Articles Tagged focus

Many forms of assistive technology use keyboard navigation to understand and take action on screen content. One way of navigating is via the Tab key. You may already be familiar with this way of navigating if you use it to quickly jump from input to input on a form without having to reach for your mouse or trackpad.

Tab will jump to interactive elements in the order they show up in the DOM. This is one of the reasons why … Read article “Focus management and inert”

Always worth repeating: all interactive elements should have a focus style. That way, a keyboard user can tell when they have moved focus to that element.

But if you use :focus alone for this, it has a side effect that a lot of people don’t like. It means that when you click (with a mouse) on an interactive element, you’ll see the focus style. Arguably, you don’t need that feedback as a mouse user, because you just moved your cursor … Read article “The :focus-visible Trick”

Remy documented this the other day. Firefox supports a Highlight keyword and both Chrome and Safari support a -webkit-focus-ring-color keyword. So if you, for example, have removed focus from something and want to put it back in the same style as the browser default, or want to apply a focus style to an element when it isn’t directly in focus itself, this can be useful.… Read article “Copy the Browser’s Native Focus Styles”

Every front-end developer has dealt or will deal with this scenario: your boss, client or designer thinks the outline applied by browsers on focused elements does not match the UI, and asks you to remove it. Or you might even be looking to remove it yourself.

So you do a little research and find out that this is strongly discouraged, because the focus outline is there for a reason: it provides visual feedback for keyboard navigation (using the Tab … Read article “Having a Little Fun With Custom Focus Styles”

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 … Read article “Keyboard-Only Focus Styles”