[Stormster]

Design proposal

Proposal: proposals/content-field-help-text.md

I run EmDash for a niche of sites, edited by normal people rather than developers. A content field has a label and nothing else, so any guidance ends up crammed into the label, like "Full text, a blank line between paragraphs". That is hard to scan, and a screen reader reads the whole thing as the field's name.

This proposes an optional helpText in a field's options (and on repeater sub-fields). The editor shows it as one line under the field and links it to the field, so screen readers read it as the field's description. Nothing new is stored, and a field without help looks exactly as it does today.

I have a working version with tests on EmDash 1.3.1 and main. Before and after, on the same form:

Before:

After:

Proposal type

• Feature plan
• RFC
• Amendment, supersession, or withdrawal

Related work

None that I found.

Readiness

• The proposal identifies its author and, for an RFC, its champion and Maintainer sponsor
• The proposal describes observable behavior, compatibility, failure handling, and verification in proportion to its risk
• Conflicting accepted or pending proposals are reconciled in this pull request
• This pull request contains no implementation code
• The proposal status is accepted (check only when ready to merge)

AI assistance

• This proposal used AI assistance — model/tool: Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5)

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