Character count

[govuk-design-system]

Use this issue to discuss the character count component.

[fofr]

We've been trialling the word count aspect of this pattern on a DfE service for managing teacher training courses.

In user research we’ve found that the word counts are clear and obvious and that users respond to them well, editing down their text to keep only what's most important.

Example screen from the prototype:

[tombye]

@fofr does your implementation include messaging for when users go over the number of words?

Curious because I've had that in previous projects but not sure it was ever validated as a need.

[fofr]

@tombye Yes, we've used the messaging that was in the original repo by @alex-ju. The messaging has worked well when users have pasted in text that was too long from another document.

[timpaul]

We're thinking about the possible error states for this component. In particular, how the 'You have 26 words too many' error should be represented in the error summary component that can appear at the top of a page.

Just repeating that message wouldn't give context about which form field the error related to. As the example above from @fofr shows it's quite possible to have multiple character count components on a single screen - so, should the error be adjusted to include information about the specific field. For example "Interview process summary has too many words".

However, if we only adjusted the error message in the summary then this would go against our advice to keep them the same.

@stevenaproctor - do you have a take on this?

[stevenaproctor]

@timpaul You could use the standard too long error message ‘[whatever it is] must be {x} [characters or words] or less’. Or, if it is available, you could use the number of characters you are over in the error message ‘[whatever it is] has {x} [characters or words] too many’.

For the example, this would give you the errors:

• Interview process must be 250 words or less
• Interview process has 26 words too many

What do you think?

[nubz]

We have a need for a character count component in one of our services at HMRC. I noticed the github readme does not recommend using this component as-is in production - does anyone know what the blocker to recommendation is?

[fofr]

Something new that we've observed in user research:

We asked users to prepare content before our service was available. We gave them word count limits. We've found that users wrote their content in Word and used Word's word count feature to check the length. When they’ve then copied that content into our tool there's been a disparity between the two counts: ours is a little stricter and users have had to edit their content to reduce by 1 or 2 words. This has caused frustration, especially when the previous word document has been reviewed/approved.

Presumably the logic for word counts in Word is a little more complex than the regex used in https://github.com/alphagov/ds-character-count. I doubt that there is consistent logic between different word processors, I like the simplicity of the regex used. (It's complicated a little by our use of markdown, where * list item counts as three words while if you type that in Word the asterisk gets converted to a bullet point and isn't counted.)

We still need to investigate the cause more thoroughly, but wanted to share this gotcha first.

Edit: When we implemented server side word counts, we reused that regex so that frontend and backend would be consistent.

[alex-ju]

valuable found @fofr. thanks a lot for sharing it with us.

[hooperstu]

Has anybody tested this with screen readers yet?

[alex-ju]

@hooperstu it was tested with screen readers and had a few user research rounds: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/wiki/Character-count-testing-and-user-research

The only issue I'm aware of is with JAWS who repeats field's label every time the count message is played.