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Re: Placeholder and Accessible Name Computation

for

From: Mallory
Date: May 10, 2019 5:07AM

I feel this is a general problem with "compliance" recommendations. I know clients
ask for it, and it's often what they are paying for-- but it would be better if as a
general industry we could say "our standards are that WCAG is a minimum and
non-WCAG UX considerations are always part of our recommendations."
(up front so anyone asking for minimum compliance knows this is what they're
going to get no matter who they turn to.)

In this case, there's a handful of regular UX problems with placeholders, like
their tendency to vanish and be low-contrast OR appear as a pre-filled default
value. So it seems easier if, regardless if a UA+AT is able to extract an accessible
name from a placeholder, we could recommend to simply not use them to
clients, even those who only want to toe the WCAG AA line. Toeing the WCAG
AA line just seems almost unethical in so many cases-- I often mentally transfer
it to fire codes. People only implement stuff because "it's in the fire code" and
don't necessarily actually care about people's safety, but inspectors would still
ideally consider efforts to only just meet the bare minimum as mildly unethical
and recommend something more.
If we could take this position globally as an industry, then differences in specs
like this example would matter less and maybe cause less hair loss on our end.

cheers,
_mallory
> On 5/9/19, Steve Green < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> > This really does need to be made very clear because when we conduct WCAG
> > audits we make recommendations for changes that cost time and money to
> > implement, not to mention the political cost of persuading stakeholders that
> > the changes are necessary. This is made all the more difficult if people
> > opposed to the changes can point to documents that appear to contradict us.
> >
> > Steve