Re: Placeholder attribute an accessible name?

 +1 to Sailesh.

My thought is that when we artificially limit conversations to the narrow
confines of what someone in the group feels is the appropriate scope of a
conversation, we miss out on opportunities to better understand unintended
consequences of our policy decisions.

In my opinion, there can be no conversation about placeholder values
satisfying the WCAG requirement for SC 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value without
there being a strong rebuff of the practice of using placeholders as form
labels for sighted non-AT users, a violation of SC 3.3.2 Labels or
Instructions.

Accessibility testers may think that having a placeholder value is all that
needs to happen for the form input to pass accessibility testing, when it
comes to having a "name" or "label" for the input.  It's easy to let a
machine tell you what's right or wrong and not give another thought to that
page element.  I know this because I've trained thousands of production
staff across numerous enterprise teams and have watched them rely on
automated results only. That "easy button" approach to accessibility
testing sets up a significantly disparate experience for assistive
technology users, and for users with cognitive disabilities who do not use
the same technology.

There's a lot of this same type of siloed logic in WCAG.  And this, I
believe, has led to the current state of the standard where we support some
people with disabilities at the expense of setting up hurdles to access for
others with different types of disabilities.

I'll say it plainly: take placeholder values out of the accessible name
computation. That programmatic indication is better positioned as something
software vendors can use as a heuristic hook to glean the content creators'
intent in the absence of proper markup of relevant form inputs.

Brooks Newton

On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 9:52 AM Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>
wrote:

> On 22/10/2022 14:19, John Foliot wrote:
> > Sailesh writes:
> >
> >      > Developers tasked with making content accessible  should not
> >     ordinarily delve into the depths of  the accessible name computation
> >     algorithm and rely on  less preferred fallback mechanisms to compute
> a
> >     name for an element.
>
> The question isn't though if developers should or shouldn't. It's
> whether or not the behaviour of browsers to use the fallback (documented
> in the accessible name computation algorithm) to expose an accessible
> name counts as passing 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value. Nominally, I'd say it
> does. Whether it's good or bad practice is a separate discussion.
>
> P
> --
> Patrick H. Lauke
>
> https://www.splintered.co.uk/ | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
> https://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | https://www.deviantart.com/redux
> twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke
>
>
>