:focus-visible Archives

Keyboard-Only Focus Styles

# November 14, 2018 By Chris Coyier

Like Eric Bailey says, if it's interactive, it needs a focus style. Perhaps your best bet? Don't remove the dang outlines that focusable elements have by default. If you're going to rock a button { outline: 0; }, for example, then you'd better do a button:focus { /* something else very obvious visually */ }. I handled a ticket just today where a missing focus style was harming a user who relies on visual focus styles to navigate the web.

But those focus styles are most useful when tabbing or otherwise navigating with a keyboard, and less so when they are triggered by a mouse click. Now we've got :focus-visible! Nelo writes:

TLDR; :focus-visible is the keyboard-only version of :focus.

Also, the W3C proposal mentions that :focus-visible should be preferred over :focus except on elements that expect a keyboard input (e.g. text field, contenteditable).

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`:focus-visible` and backwards compatibility

# April 8, 2018 By Chris Coyier

Patrick H. Lauke covers the future CSS pseudo class :focus-visible. We're in the early days of browser support, but it aims to solve an awkward situation:

... focus styles can often be undesirable when they are applied as a result of a mouse/pointer interaction. A classic example of this are buttons which trigger a particular action on a page, such as advancing a carousel. While it is important that a keyboard user is able to see when their focus is on the button, it can be confusing for a mouse user to find the look of the button change after they clicked it – making them wonder why the styles “stuck”, or if the state/functionality of the button has somehow changed.

If we use :focus-within instead of :focus, that gives the browser the freedom to not apply focus styles when it determines it's unnecessary, but still does when, for example, the element is tabbed to.

The scary part is "instead of". We can just up and switch with browser support as it is. Not even @supports can help us. But Patrick has some ideas.

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:focus-visible focus