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Re: Placeholder

for

From: JP Jamous
Date: Mar 19, 2019 10:41PM

Placeholder is not WCAG 2 compliant at all. It is not listed in WCAG 2, because placeholders came out later. However, the way a placeholder functions fails other level AA success criteria of WCAG 2. (Smiles, I love it when developers have strong Egos. I have some of those at my company.)

I have worked at multiple corporates in the USA and I can assure you that placeholders are not compliant. In fact, we prefer labels using the FOR attribute even if HTML5 is being used.

1. People with cognitive disabilities can be impacted by place holders
2. Placeholders do not have a proper color contrast for low vision and color-blind users
3. Placeholders do not remain visible enough for low vision users to read them
4. Placeholders disappear automatically without the user being alerted beforehand, which fails level AA of WCAG 2


Do your developers want more evidence? I would also like to see where in WCAG 2.0, they found that placeholders are compliant. *smiles*

It is a typical pushback from the developers. My suggestion to you is to bring the UX designers to your side. Educate them so they do not use placeholders in their design and to refuse to have developers use it as it is not a good user experience anyways. That will be your best bet to enforce that upon them. They are using it because it is less coding and saves precious space on the page especially in a mobile UI.



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JP Jamous
Senior Digital Accessibility Engineer
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