RE: Placeholder attribute an accessible name?

Sailesh, immediately following the text you paraphrased is the following note:

"These mechanisms are very similar but subtly different: the hint given by the control's label is shown at all times; the short hint given in the placeholder attribute is shown before the user enters a value; and the hint in the title attribute is shown when the user requests further help."

The term 'hint' is used simultaneously to describe a control's label, a placeholder  attribute, and a title attribute ... in my mind, a label is not a hint irrespective of whether its visibility is conditional or requested. 

There is no normative definition of 'hint' in WCAG either.

A hint might be more akin to referring to you according to your physiognomy or the clothes you are currently wearing rather than by your name.  

So, back to my original contention, that there is significant disconnect between the existing WCAG specifications and the HTML standard least of all with regards to advocating the use of the title attribute for 'longer hints'.

My understanding of the name and description computation algorithm would mean that 'search' would be announced three times by a screen reader in the following code:
<label for="input1">search</label>
<input type="text" name="input1" id="input1" placeholder="search" title="search" />

The algorithm should ideally filter for this kind of developer garbage in my view hence why I asked the question as to whether there should be further refinement to accommodate cases related to specific combinations of elements and attributes?


-----Original Message-----
From: Sailesh Panchang <sailesh.panchang@deque.com> 
Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2022 11:22 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Cc: Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@levelaccess.com>; Adam Cooper <cooperad@bigpond.com>; John Foliot <john@foliot.ca>; Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Placeholder attribute an accessible name?

The HTML spec cannot be clearer and more explicit when it says:
"The placeholder attribute represents a short hint (a word or short
phrase) intended to aid the user with data entry when the control has no value. ... The placeholder attribute should not be used as an alternative to a label."
The accessibility naming rules  list attributes by order of preference. The items that occur later in the list are less preferred and simply meant as a fallback for AT users to help their users when good markup is absent.
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.
Thanks,
--
Sailesh Panchang
Customer Success Strategist and Principal Accessibility Consultant Deque Systems Inc
381 Elden Street, Suite 2000, Herndon,
VA 20170
Mobile: 571-344-1765

Received on Monday, 24 October 2022 04:32:38 UTC