Accessibility is important — right up there next the regular intake of oxygen. So when I came across this piece on “Unlabelled search fields” by Mr. Keith, I had to help spread the word.

Adam Silver is writing a book on forms — you may be familiar with his previous book on maintainable CSS. In a recent article (that for some reason isn’t on his blog), he looks at markup patterns for search forms and advocates that we should always use a label. I agree. But for some reason, we keep getting handed designs that show unlabelled search forms. And no, a placeholder is not a label.

Jeremy then goes through several examples of how design teams around hte world are working through this problem. I don’t want to spoil the conclusion, but safe-to-say, if you make digital things, you need to read this piece and share it out to your own network.