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Why you should stop using placeholders in text boxes

Daniel Berryhill
UX Collective
Published in
8 min readJan 29, 2024

Stop sign.
Photo by Will Porada on Unsplash

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:

Facebook home page. It has text boxes for Email/phone number and Password. Both use placeholders for labels.

As does YouTube:

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.

What’s the problem with placeholders?

Problem #1: Placeholders disappear upon input

You are forcing the user to remember the text of the placeholder. Now that they’ve started typing, the placeholder is gone. The only way to get it back is to remove the text from the text box.

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I must respectfully disagree, and here are a few reasons why:
Placeholders don't necessarily need to disappear when one clicks on an input element. They can serve as labels. In some UI libraries, when you click on an input element, the placeholder…

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Been saying this for years. Great read! 100% agree!

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Lots of valid points..
Low color contrast, usually disappearing upon clicking, they shouldn't contain any important information on how to enter correct data.

Yet still they are everywhere 😵‍💫

Thanks for sharing 👍...

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