Why you should stop using placeholders in text boxes

Your text boxes don’t need them — plus, they’re pointless

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

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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:

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