RE: [REVIEW REQUESTED][ARIA] placeholder

Here’s a relevant article on placeholder and issues for visual and cognitive disabilities:
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/form-design-placeholders


> While i agree in theory, the reality is that the placeholder attribute is often used as the label for an input.

If it were possible to show that 5560 examples across the web used the following syntax:

<div role=”checkbox” aria-selected=”true”></div>

Would we have to say in the spec that this is a valid use of the checkbox role and it’s supporting state by getting browsers to map aria-selected to checkbox?

From: Steve Faulkner [mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 04, 2015 1:49 AM
To: Joseph Scheuhammer
Cc: Alexander Surkov; Joanmarie Diggs; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: Re: [REVIEW REQUESTED][ARIA] placeholder


On 2 April 2015 at 21:52, Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu<mailto:clown@alum.mit.edu>> wrote:
Since the purpose of @placeholder is to provide a clue as to the format of the input value, then the AT needs to communicate that as well.

While i agree in theory, the reality is that the placeholder attribute is often used as the label for an input.

Here is 5565 examples of usage of the placeholder attribute (from partial grep of top 87,000 web site home pages: source latest data set 2015-01-08 (780 Mb)<http://files.paciellogroup.com/HTMLData/webdevdata.org-2015-01-07-112944.7z> 87,000 pages.)

LARGE HTML file (6mb)
http://www.html5accessibility.com/HTML5data/top15000-placeholder.html


If you take the time to review this data, it quickly becomes evident, that despite 'best practice' and the definition of what a placeholder should be, it more often than not provides an accessible name for an input.

--

Regards

SteveF
HTML 5.1<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>