Placeholders in patron search form hold valuable information that disappears when there is text in the field

[Jane Sandberg]

Currently, the patron search form uses placeholders instead of labels for fields in the patron search form. This has two UX disadvantages:

1) If you type something into the form, do something else, and then come back to it, there's no way to tell which field you are searching. I've done this to myself a few times: I'll go into a patron record, go back to my search, and completely not remember what field I'm searching on. The only way to find out is to delete your query so that the placeholder disappears.

2) The placeholder element is not treated consistently by assistive technologies, so those fields may or may not actually have an accessible name that the staff member can use.

For further reading, one of the W3C work group collected a bunch of different articles about placeholders: https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/low-vision-a11y-tf/wiki/Placeholder_Research