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formsRAMS

Form Inputs Missing Labels

MUST

MUST: Every form input must have associated <label> with htmlFor, be wrapped by <label>, or have aria-label. Placeholder is not a substitute for labels.

All form inputs must have associated labels

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Rams lists this as a Critical accessibility check (WCAG 1.3.1) in its review table; the upstream skill is a checklist, so that terse row is the whole rule. Why it matters: the label is what a screen reader announces on focus, and what a click target extends to. Placeholder text is not a substitute — it disappears the moment the user types.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.