The hint text inside form fields was too pale to read

The grey placeholder text that tells you what to type — in 176 fields across the platform — sat at 2.3:1 against a white box, half of what it needs to be readable. It is now dark enough to read.

Placeholder text is the small grey line inside an empty field: "Share a little snippet of your story", "Search mentors", "you@example.com". Ours was set to a very light grey, which measured 2.3:1 against the white of the field — the worst readable-text ratio we have found anywhere on Designed, on some of the most-read hint text in the product. WCAG 2.2 asks for 4.5:1.

It was one colour, written five times over in an old stylesheet, and it reached every one of the 176 fields that use a placeholder. All five now use the same muted-text colour the rest of the platform uses, at 5.4:1. The small italic helper lines under file uploads, critique paths and mentor job titles moved to it too — those were at 4.48:1, under the line by the kind of hair that looks deliberate and is not.

Nothing about the layout changed; the hint text is simply darker.

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