Don't use dark gray text on selectable fields / Don't use light placeholder text on empty fields

As a Roblox developer it is too easy to get confused as to why I “can’t” edit creator/genre of a to-be-published experience (1):

or why the command bar “isn’t” empty (2):

image

1: It has happened several times where I accidentally upload an experience to my profile when it was intended to be hosted on a group, because the defaults “Me” and “All” use a darker gray, and imply read-only state, which causes me to miss them and confuses me as I assume they are read-only, so I don’t even think twice to click it. For users with low vision, this could be even be a bigger problem. The text should be lighter – gray text globally implies read-only state/emptiness.

Examples

Example of the former on the very Discourse forum software:

image
image

Example of the latter:


2: Since the text is lighter here, this misleads users, as it looks like the command bar’s text is actually “Run a command” when it is just placeholder text as the command bar is actually empty. Here, the text should be grayed out.

If this were to be changed, this would be cause less assumptions to be made, and would be a huge help for users that may have low vision.

28 Likes