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can redundant placeholder text be considered "incidental"?

for

From: glen walker
Date: May 12, 2022 11:55AM

We have a form with asterisks on the labels for required fields (and an
instruction line saying what the asterisk means).

So fields without an asterisk can be considered optional.

We also have placeholder text on the optional fields that says "optional".
It's redundant information because the label doesn't have an asterisk. It
kind of reinforces that the field is optional but isn't necessary to know
it's there.

Placeholder text typically fails color contrast. Would you consider
redundant placeholder text as "incidental" with regards to the exception in
1.4.3?

The placeholder text is not "part of an inactive user interface component"
so that part of the incidental text definition doesn't apply.

I also have a hard time applying "pure decoration" to the placeholder
although it's close. The normative definition (
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#dfn-pure-decoration) of "pure decoration" is
"serving only an aesthetic purpose, providing no information, and having no
functionality". In this case, the placeholder isn't really for aesthetic
purposes and it does provide information, albeit redundant information.
Maybe you could interpret it as aesthetic as a bit of a stretch.

The last part of the 1.4.3 incidental exception says "part of a picture
that contains significant other visual content". While the placeholder
text is not part of a picture, there is other significant visual content
(the field label, with or without the asterisk).

My preference is to have the placeholder have sufficient contrast. That's
just a better UX. But as you know, there are some companies looking at the
"checklist" approach to accessibility and want to (initially) fix only
things that strictly fail WCAG. I'm sure I could argue that it does fail,
but playing the devil's advocate, can you see a reason why it wouldn't
fail? My only thought is how to consider it "incidental" text.