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Re: Placeholder text contrast

for

From: Whitney Quesenbery
Date: Mar 22, 2015 5:32AM

Jesse: Our usability studies found that people thought that form fields were

already filled out when placeholder text color met 4.5:1.

This is really common, no matter what the contrast ratio is.

On placeholder text inside the form: just say no! It's bad for everyone.

Here's an article from Caroline Jarrett, who wrote the book on forms (Forms
that Work):
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/03/dont-put-hints-inside-text-boxes-in-web-forms.php

Don't Put Hints Inside Text Boxes in Web Forms

She goes through some of the research and the logic, and ends with
"If you include hint text inside your form's text boxes, many users—quite
likely, the majority—will interpret the hint text as a default. If that's
what you want, go right ahead. Otherwise, think of another way of helping
your users."


On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 11:48 AM _mallory via WebAIM-Forum <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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
> > > >