Remove placeholder text from Dropdown/Multiselect fields

[laurenmrice]

After discussions with Accessibility we have decided to remove current placeholder text from the fields of Dropdown and Multiselect. However, the Multiselect and Filterable Multiselect selected states can still provide text in the field along with the number tag to help inform the user that options(s) are selected.

When we discussed this in the CAG call, there was potential dev concern around if this would be a breaking change for the end user if they were currently placeholder text in product for these components. It was mentioned that we could think about having a deprecation warning for placeholder text in dropdown and multiselect for a few releases if it makese sense to. For reference, we previously did this same change to the Select component #13008 and I know in the past we did this with Combobox and Filterable Multiselect.

Ref a11y issue: #3363

---

Design Spec

• Below are the enabled states of what the Dropdown and Multiselect should look like.
• Below are selected states of what the Multiselect and Filterable Multiselect should look like.

Code of Conduct

• [X] I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[tay1orjones]

So the previous scope of this for Select was to just remove the placeholder text from the storybook stories, which is what we could start with here. Removing the actual prop for placeholder text would be a breaking change that we can't do right now.

[thyhmdo]

Just to document a few comments from @aubrey-oneal and @lesnider

---

Aubrey: I like having the helper text say 'select a fruit' so that it's clear they haven't made a choice yet. To avoid redundancy it then makes sense for the title to say Fruit. I do prefer the grayed out helper text but I see that it is 'outdated'. Is this an accessibility concern?

---

Laura:

• The field label should be a noun (Fruit) and the in-field text should be a mild command or direction (Select a fruit).
• If you label each field "Select a..." and there are multiple fields, users will eventually ignore the "Select a" part.
• We do need the direction (Select a fruit) in the field right where users make a selection from the drop-down options, though, because visually challenged users who use screen readers need to know what to do and exactly where to do it.

---

An image for reference