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currently there is a weak author conformance requirement in regards to the use of the placeholder attribute "The placeholder attribute should not be used as an alternative to a label." this weakness is likely to result in a range of users not being able to access a text prompt for an input as authors will misuse the placeholder attribute to provide text labels, this weakness does a disservice to users. suggest making the conforming use of placeholder dependent on the presence of an explicitly associated text label using either label element or non empty title attribute on the element.
Placeholder often is used as an alternative to a label. It's intended to provide a more visually compact presentation. Sometimes, such controls have a button next to them further indicating the function. Consider the placeholder and/or placeholder-like display at the following sites: http://www.apple.com/ https://us.etrade.com/ http://www.reddit.com/ http://digg.com/news I don't think any of these would benefit from a visible label. I would suggest instead a requirement that placeholder should be exposed to assistive technologies as a label if there is no actual programatically associated label.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: There's no problem here. Yes, browsers have to implement their UI accessibly, but the spec doesn't preclude that.
The placeholder attribute, this attribute can be used on form elements to predefine text that disappears as soon as the field gets focus. It's a visual indication of what is expected in the field. If, and only if, the field has no label otherwise, this placeholder text will be used to generate the AccessibleName, the name the screen reader speaks for the field when it gains focus. If the field has a label provided by the label element or an ARIA construct, the placeholder text will be ignored. For more details of a Firefox implementation see Marco Zehes Blog http://www.marcozehe.de/2010/11/09/new-accessibility-support-for-html5-elements-and-attributes/
Turns out that sometimes not doing so is legit, and we have covered the case.