Who does Lorem Ipsum leave out?

I've filled thousands of text boxes with fake Latin. Drop the block into a frame, paste the paragraph, get on with the layout.

It's so normal that it never felt like a decision, which is more or less why I keep looking at it.

What I never did, in all those boxes, was wonder what it sounds like out loud.

A screen reader reads every word of it

Put a Lorem Ipsum prototype in front of eight people and seven of them will do something reasonable. They'll skim past the gray blocks, understand that the words aren't the point, and give useful feedback on hierarchy and flow.

The eighth person is using a screen reader, and there's no gray block for them to skim past.

They get a voice reading Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit at their listening speed, in full, before anything useful arrives.

They can't glance at it. Glancing is something sight affords, and we built the whole convention on top of it without noticing that we had.

So this person will probably say less in that session than everyone else, and we'll write that down as a quiet participant. What happened is that the prototype wouldn't let them in.

Nobody complains when this happens, which is the trouble. It shows up as a gap in the data, and a gap is hard to notice and easy to repeat next quarter.

It isn't only a research problem, though, and I underestimated this part for years. Placeholder text hides the things that break real interfaces.

Latin has an even texture, with no long words, numbers, names or diacritics, and it runs to a length we chose on purpose.

Real content has all of those, which is why layouts that looked comfortable in the file start truncating the week after launch.

It hides meaning too, and that matters more. We can't judge a label reading Lorem ipsum beside a field for clarity, and clarity is an accessibility property.

It matters for people with cognitive disabilities, for anyone reading in a second language, and for anyone doing this while tired. We can't test whether people understand a design using text that means nothing (which sounds obvious once it's typed out).

Our tools make the habit effortless

It survives mostly because everything around us makes it easy. Figma offers it, plugins generate it, and every tutorial we learned from used it.

Don Norman's point about affordances applies to our own tools as much as to the things we make with them. When a tool makes one action effortless it has made a decision for us, and we'll mostly go along with it.

What the tools don't offer is the question. Nothing in the interface asks who is going to hear this. The choice costs us nothing when we make it, and the cost lands later on someone with a different job title.

We both believe UX professionals do not intentionally exclude people from their work. Nobody reaches for placeholder text in order to shut a participant out.

We reach for it because it's fast, because the tool suggests it and because we inherited it. I think almost every accessibility failure starts that way, once we look closely.

Our defaults carry an assumption about who is in the room, and it's nearly always someone who works the way I do. Placeholder text is a small case of that.

Microsoft's inclusive design principles put the sequence better than I can: recognize exclusion, learn from diversity, solve for one and extend to many.

Lorem Ipsum is what happens when we skip the first step. We skip it without malice, because recognizing exclusion means examining the parts of our practice we've agreed are settled.

Real sentences go in the box

I wouldn't fix this with a checklist item at the end. I'd change the default we start with.

• Write real sentences, badly. A rough, honest sentence ("Your application was received on 3 March") tests more than a perfect paragraph of Latin can. It shows length, tone and whether the label above it makes sense.
• Use content that could plausibly be true. Real names of realistic length, real error messages and real empty states. Empty states are where placeholder habits last longest, because nobody designs them twice.
• Read the screen aloud before the session. It doesn't have to be with a screen reader. If something is unbearable to say, it's unbearable to hear.
• Recruit for the session you claim to be running. A study that never includes assistive technology users only measures the product for people who work the way we do.

I built No Latin (opens in a new tab), a web app that turns content blocks into an accessible HTML prototype, out of this.

The tool came after the habit, though, and the habit is the part I care about. Any team can change it this afternoon with no tooling at all.

The gray blocks in your next file are a good place to start. It'll cost an afternoon and a few honest sentences.

Then there's the question I'd ask before the session starts, and not after. Who is in the room, and what will the first thirty seconds sound like to them?

It sounds odd for a sighted participant. For everyone else, those thirty seconds are the whole experience.