Default Place-Holding Characters
Gez Lemon asks whether Default Place-Holding Characters in form controls are still an accessibility requirement. I’ve always felt that this checkpoint was weird and could cause more problems than it solves. Apparently it is no longer something you should do, according to the WCAG 2.0 working draft: Place-holding characters in empty controls (deprecated):
This is a negative technique, an example of something you shouldn’t do. This technique corresponds to a WCAG 1.0 checkpoint. There is a proposal for an erratum that states the until user agents clause is met and this checkpoint (and thus technique) are no longer necessary.
- Previous post: Architecting CSS
- Next post: PDF Accessibility
Information, sponsorship, and externals
About the author
Roger Johansson is a Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability. More about me and this site.
Latest articles
- Validation statistics from Nikita the Spider Comments off
- An analysis of the sites crawled by the bulk validation tool Nikita the Spider during March 2008.
- Authentic Jobs API and Affiliates program Comments off
- The Authentic Jobs job listing service now has a public API and an affiliate program.
- What does Acid3 mean to you and me? Comments off
- Opera and Apple have announced that their web browsers pass the Acid3 Browser Test, but how will that help web designers and developers?
- Designing Web Navigation (Book review) Comments off
- Learn the fundamentals of navigation design and design better navigation systems for large and small sites as well as for web based applications.
- DOMAssistant bundle for TextMate Comments off
- To save keystrokes and speed up development I have created a DOMAssistant bundle for TextMate.
- First impressions of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Comments off
- My impressions after trying out Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for a couple of days.
Comments
I cheated on that requirement; glad it's being removed.
In a short correspondence last year, Joe Clark and me also agreed on this. Personally, I never used placeholders for input elements since testing never revealed any problems, assuming that you label your forms and write sufficient microcontent, among others.
The WCAG 1.0 checklist (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/full-checklist.html) says "until user agents handle empty controls correctly".
As far as I know, the only user agent that had a problem with empty form control was Netscape 2, which I think we can safely consider obselete.
Thus I think leaving out placeholding text entirely is fine, as far as meeting that guideline goes. That's the approach I've always taken.
WebXACT flags empty form controls as a Priority 3 Error and so far I have acquiesced and put them in, but I've always felt placeholding text gets in the way and I never quite understood why it was needed...
What SHOULD we use (besides common sense of course) to show clients how accessible their site is or isn't, if the online tools do not reflect current thinking?
I can't envisage most clients sitting through a rendition of WCAG 2.0, but they seem able to get their heads around an online report that says good / bad...
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.