Re: Issues with HTML5 placeholder and related Accessibility API mappings

note there is a bug filed on the HTML accessibility API mapping sepc
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=28270

--

Regards

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

On 19 March 2015 at 19:16, Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com
> wrote:

> Hi,
> Per the ARIA Caucus call this morning, I'll clarify the point I mentioned
> at the end of the call that wasn't able to be minuted.
>
> The issue being that many see placeholder as a label substitute, which is
> an incorrect assumption, even though the spec seems to imply that this is
> true.
>
> Technically the concept of placeholder is to provide hint text in the
> place where the value is to be entered, as a temporary 'place holder' for
> the value of that field, not as a label for that field.
>
> When placeholder is used as a label however, it is temporary and
> disappears when a user interacts with the field, rendering this as useless
> as a visual label, which presents cognitive accessibility issues for some
> users, and presents additional issues for non-sighted AT users.
>
> As such, it seems logical to me to treat placeholder as a temporary field
> value in the accessibility tree when there is no actual value present on
> the edit control, because it's acting as a place holder value, which would
> have no impact if the form was submitted because it still wouldn't exist in
> the DOM as the value of that field.
>
> Additionally, here illustrates the issue with using placeholder as a
> labelling mechanism in the accessibility tree:
>
> <input title="Birth date" placeholder="mm/dd/yyyy" />
>
> In IE11, the title is used as the accessible name for the field, and there
> is no representation of the placeholder text in either the value,
> description, or help properties for that object.
>
> In Firefox however, the placeholder text is used as the form field label,
> and the title is used as the description for that object, which to me,
> should be the other way around if this is the desirable way to go, since
> the title is the explicit label, and the placeholder is the description.
>
> This last technique presents issues as well, take for example the
> following:
>
> <input title="Birth date" placeholder="mm/dd/yyyy" aria-describedby="t1id"
> />
> <div id="t1id"> Make sure you only enter a future date </div>
>
> Now, suddenly in FF, the explicit label provided using the title attribute
> is gone, not in the name nor description properties, nor is it anywhere
> else, making it undetectable for AT users even though it appears visually
> to sighted mouse users.
>
> It still seems to me that the best place is to either use the value
> property to temporarily convey the placeholder value until actual content
> is entered into the field using a text change event, or to use a custom
> property for this purpose that doesn't involve either the name or
> description.
>
>
>
>