- From: Nick Kew <nick@webthing.com>
- Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 22:57:41 +0100 (BST)
- To: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
On Fri, 23 May 2003, David Woolley wrote: > > > I feel that this may be a case of whole legions of Web developers having > > to do extra work to make up for the failings of but a few programmers > > (those writing the screen readers). I do both, so I'm not biased ;-) > > Are you sure the placeholders are there for accessibility reasons. Erm, not so much accessibility as compliance-by-rote with broken checkers. > It's > become a standard idiom to use a dummy entry in selection lists I don't think selection lists were the issue. > give imperative instructions on what to enter there. Maybe some > of placeholders are there because of the designer's feeling that they > must order the user at every opportunity? Well, just occasionally it can be helpful to pre-fill a field, with an onfocus event to clear it (as already suggested by someone else). But that should be an informed decision by the author, not unthinking compliance. -- Nick Kew In urgent need of paying work - see http://www.webthing.com/~nick/cv.html
Received on Friday, 23 May 2003 17:57:48 UTC