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Re: Include default text?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Oct 21, 2004 3:41PM

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Jared Smith wrote:

> The key is the "Until user agents handle empty controls correctly"
> Virtually all user agents expose empty form controls to the end user.
> So, in my opinion, this checkpoint can be ignored.

You put it too mildly. It _should_ be ignored. You _must not_ put any
dummy placeholder or explanatory text into a text input field. Such text
is worse than useless, since it causes extra trouble (it needs to be
removed before typing actual content, and then again a user might fail to
do this and enter incorrect data), it could be misunderstood as a
meaningful default value (that's what the initial content is for!), etc.
Remember that accessibility is also about being accessible to people whose
cognitive and mental abilities are far more limited than yours. Don't
create any extra puzzles or challenges for them.

(So was the WCAG 1.0 checkpoint wrong from the beginning? Yes. It caused
more trouble than good. Some people actually applied it, and who's going
to fix all those prefilled fields now?)

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/