"Oh, why don't we make it just a white field on a white background with just an underlines and perhaps invisible light gray borders. And for disabled state we'll make it an unreadable gray on gray"
You see it everywhere. That 600 people study that Google did for Material Design? It's infuriating, through and through: "Enclosed text fields with a rectangular (box) shape performed better than those with a line affordance" https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...
Compare and contrast with people who actually think about these things: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/text-input/
Gov.uk is a government site that has to accessible to absolutely everyone, including tech-illiterate users. It also has a comparatively low density.
No. It's not the job of the user to make thin near-invisible lines or gray-on-gray text legible
> Gov.uk is a government site that has to accessible to absolutely everyone,
Exactly. And how is this a bad thing?
I think the "Increase Contrast" setting on MacOS does exactly what you want. The one in Windows 11 also seems quite decent. Maybe if you try it out, you'll realize why it isn't the default.
> how is [the uncompromising accessibility of Gov.uk] a bad thing?
It only works because of it's low density. There's very little consideration for hierarchy or depth.
That it works for majority of users has to be proven
> I think the "Increase Contrast" setting
Will do nothing for nearly invisible lines or dark gray on slightly darker gray in the text input "designs"
> It only works because of it's low density.
That the PatternFly design will work at "high density" for some undefined definition if high density also has to be proven.
Like Google, you may want to conduct a user study with 600 people to give you some common sense
https://www.patternfly.org/v4/components/text-area/#textarea
Worse than most inputs, it had the audacity to sling you back to the start if you look at it the wrong way while trying to scroll right.