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Screenshot of the article explaining that Placeholders are not labels. Accessibility advocates have been saying this for a very long time. But that hasn’t stopped developers from using placeholders as visual labels. Even Facebook’s home page does this. As does YouTube. Top portion of YouTube’s home page that contains a search text box that uses a placeholder as a label. Placeholders are not labels. There are so many problems with placeholders from a usability and accessibility standpoint, I don’t think they should ever be used.

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Screenshot of the article explaining that Placeholders are not labels. Accessibility advocates have been saying this for a very long time. But that hasn’t stopped developers from using placeholders as visual labels. Even Facebook’s home page does this. As does YouTube. Top portion of YouTube’s home page that contains a search text box that uses a placeholder as a label. Placeholders are not labels. There are so many problems with placeholders from a usability and accessibility standpoint, I don’t think they should ever be used.
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Stef Walter (stephaniewalter@front-end.social)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 16:49:38 JST Stef Walter

This is your monthly reminder that you should stop using placeholders in text boxes.
HTML placeholders are not labels, and shouldn’t be used as such.
Here are a couple of issues with them, according to Daniel Berryhill:
- They disappear upon input, so, you are forcing people to remember what they are supposed to fill.
- They might be confused with pre-populated data, so the user might wonder “wait do I need to fill this?” or skip it, thinking it’s filled.

In conversation about 10 months ago from front-end.social permalink