Messed up a college entrance exam form once that used a small <textarea> with several lines requiring a response. Thought there was only 2 or 3 questions when the remaining 5 or so were out of view. Without the scroll bar I had no way of knowing I wasn't viewing the entirety of the element. An example of bad form design, but still.
Wouldn't a "submit" button be located at the bottom of the form?
In which case, in order to submit the form you would scroll down until you see the button, and would therefore have scrolled past all the fields?
It sounds like the form itself had a lot of problems. Either there wasn't enough contrast on the fields to know they existed, or the submit button was located above fields that needed to be saved, which is an inexcusable interface design choice. Also one could argue that there should be form validation as well to alert the user of critical unfilled form fields. Then again, we can't rule out simple user error.
I don't know, it just sounds like a lot of stuff was going on here. I doubt a scroll bar on the side of the webpage would be the critical element that solved all of the problems. I have no problem criticizing Apple, but its hard to put the responsibility of the entire internets' usability problems solely onto their shoulders.
The whole editable portion of the form was just a list of questions in a single <textarea> (you'd give your response under each one). Below the <textarea> was a submit button, so it was unclear that more text was in that element than was immediately shown. Obviously they should have created a proper form with separate inputs for each question.
