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Re: Do you need to have a label on a form field when it has a default value?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sep 13, 2010 10:30AM

William Lawrence wrote:

> Default text in the value attribute implicitly labels the form input.

No, it explicitly fills the input field with data that should be acceptable
as actual input by many, or most, users. A typical example is prefilling a
field with a person's name if it can be retrieved from a database on the
basis of previous user actions.

Using the initial (default) content for "labelling" or "clues" is just all
wrong. Some accessibility-oriented people still believe in the grossly
outdated (and, actually, even initially wrong) accessibility recommendations
that say that all fields should have nonempty initial content. It's just as
mad as it sounds, or actually worse.

> Form input elements must always be explicitly labeled, either with a
> label element or with the title attribute of the input element.

That's just further confusion and has nothing to do with "default text".

Every input field, except usually submit buttons (which explain themselves,
or should do that), should have an explanatory label text before them. Using
<label> markup is good but less crucial. And title attributes just tend to
confuse people, especially if authors mistakenly use them _instead of_
proper labeling.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/