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Re: Placeholder text contrast

for

From: _mallory
Date: Mar 21, 2015 10:10AM

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 09:33:25PM -0400, via WebAIM-Forum wrote:
> I would point the design team to the wealth of usability studies that say, even ignoring accessibility considerations, users simply don't understand how to interact with form field placeholders.
>
> eg. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/form-design-placeholders/
>
> They don't work, they confuse users, and they worsen form fill success. Given all the evidence, I don't see why developers won't give up on their conviction that placeholders are good design.

Probably two reasons:
1. graphic designers often have the clout to tell developers what
to do, and clients and bosses seem to always side with the graphic
designers. Pretty almost always wins, and it will continue to do
so as long as the Majority views web sites and apps as things that
sell based on how artfully tasteful (or tastefully artful) they
are while usablity comes a distant second. This must be one of those
unfixible human-nature things...

2. Hints have always been a problem, and hints in some forms are
necessary. Placeholders were an attempt, but the implementation
is poor and the graphics people grabbed onto them as a "solution"
to "ugly" labels.

The other solutions?
1. Loads of text around each label (I was recently filling out a
government form and many fields had a good couple of sentences' worth
of explanation per field), which can and has tripped up people with
cognitive disorders.
2. on-hover popups, which tend to leave out keyboarders, and when the
developers load them into the labels or associate them with the inputs
using aria-describedby, some peoplw like SR users get a boatload of
text on focus of the input, causing then the same problems we got
when we just had the text sitting out around the label.
3. I've tried on-focus and on-click popups, but popups in general
have plenty of known problems themselves.

While Postel's law could help with some things (force the developer
to write a boatload of checks, tests, regexes and locale/i18n-aware
text filtering to allow any sort of, for example, date information
to become whatever format the back-end system requires, thus
removing the need to tell the user HOW to input the data), it
can't take care of all situations. And sometimes there's so much
info needed that we resort to links to other pages: and now what?
Should the user lose their place on the form? Should the page be
presented as a popup to prevent this? Should it be a "normal" link
and just go to the information page? If so, how to they get back
to exactly where they were, and how can we ensure that they also
can get back into their "filling out a form" state of mind?

And when the front-end developer (the one who's coding the form) has
zero control on the back-end processing, because the input is being
passed on to some 3rd party who isn't even the hiring client and is
using some ancient COBOL-based thing that nobody is going to touch
again until it's time to upgrade to some complete other system?

I think it's actually pretty easy to see why developers have glommed
onto placholders, for all their faults: it *looks* easy. It *seems*
to fix a bunch of problems. And we are lazy folk, not only in the good
Larry-Wall definition, but also the bad general-world definition.

The easiest way to get people to stop using placeholders (whether as
label replacements, or as they were meant to be used, as field hints)?
We need to fix these hard problems and present developer-usable answers.

I dunno, is this fixable? If not, how do we tell people "no" and expect
them to listen?

_mallory