Focusing on Focus Styles

Not everyone uses a mouse to browse the internet. If you’re reading this post on a smartphone, this is obvious! What’s also worth pointing out is that there are other forms of input that people use to get things done. With these forms of input comes the need for focus styles.

People

People are complicated. We don’t necessarily perform the same behaviors consistently, nor do we always make decisions that make sense from an outsider’s perspective. Sometimes we even do something just to… do something. We get bored easily: tinkering, poking, and prodding things to customize them to better suit our needs, regardless of their original intent.

People are also mortal. We can get sick and injured. Sometimes both at once. Sometimes it’s for a little while, sometimes it’s permanent. Regardless, it means that sometimes we’re unable to do things we want or need to do in the way we’re used to.

People also live in the world. Sometimes we’re put into an environment where external factors conspire to prevent us from doing something the way that we’re accustomed to doing it. Ever been stuck at your parents’ house during the holidays and had to use their ancient-yet-still-serviceable desktop computer? It’s like that.

Input

Both mouse and touch input provide an indicator for interaction. For touch, it is obvious: Your finger acts as the bridge that connects your mind to the item on the screen it wants to activate. For mice, a cursor serves as a proxy for your finger.

However, these aren’t the only forms of input available to us. Keyboards are ubiquitous and can do just about anything a mouse or touch input can accomplish, provided you know all the right keys to press in the right order. Sometimes it’s even easier and faster than using a mouse!

Think about the last time you were using Cut, Copy, Paste, and Save functionality. Maybe it was the last time you were working on a spreadsheet? Were you switching between mouse and keyboard input to get things done as efficiently as possible? You probably didn’t give that behavior a second thought, but it’s a great example of switching input on the fly to best accomplish a goal. Heck, maybe you even took some "me time" during this thankless task to poke the Like button on Facebook on your smartphone.

If you have trouble using your hands, other options are available: Wands, sticks, switches, sip and puff devices, voice recognition, and eye tracking technology can all create input in a digital system. These devices will identify a content area and activate it. This is similar to how you can hit the tab key on a keyboard and the next cell in a spreadsheet will be highlighted, indicating that it has been moved to and is ready to be edited.

In this video, video editor and accessibility consultant Christopher Hills demonstrates the capabilities of Switch Control, software that helps people experiencing motor control impairments use hardware switches to operate their computing devices.

It’s worth pointing out that you could be relying on this technology one day, even if it’s only for a little bit. Maybe you broke both of your arms in an unfortunate mountain biking accident, and want to order some self-pity takeout while you recuperate. Maybe you’re driving and want to text your family safely. Or maybe you’ll just get old. It’s not difficult to think of other examples, it’s just not a concept people like to dwell on.

If it’s interactive, it needs a focus style

We can’t always know who is visiting our websites and web apps, why they’re visiting, what they’re going to do when they get there, what conditions they are experiencing, what emotions they’re feeling, or what input they may use. Analytics might provide some insight, but does not paint a full picture. It’d be foolish to have the tail wag the dog and optimize the entire experience based on this snapshot of limited information.

It’s also important to know that not everyone who uses assistive technology wants to be identified as an assistive technology user. Nor should they be forced to disclose this. Power users—people who leverage keyboard shortcuts, specialized software, and browser extensions—may appear to navigate like a user of assistive technology, yet may not be experiencing any disability conditions. Again, people are complicated!

What we can do is preemptively provide an experience that works for everyone, regardless of ability or circumstance.

Identify and activate

:focus

With these alternate forms of input, how do we identify something to show it can be activated? Fortunately, CSS has this problem handled—we use the :focus and :active selectors.

The grammar is straightforward. Want to outline a link in orange when a user focuses on it? Here’s how to describe it:

a:focus {
  outline: 3px solid orange;
}

This outline will appear when someone navigates to the link, be it by clicking or tapping, tabbing to it via keyboard input, or using switch input to highlight it.

A common misconception is that the focus style can only use the outline property. It’s worth noting that :focus is a selector like any other, meaning that it accepts the full range of CSS properties. I like to play with background color, underlining, and other techniques that don’t adjust the component’s current size, so as to not shift page layout when the selector is activated.

Then say we want to remove the link’s underline when activated to communicate a shift in state. Remember: links use underlines!

a:active {
  text-decoration: none;
}

It’s important to make sure the state changes, from resting to focused to activated, are distinct. This means that each transition should be unique when compared to the component’s other states, allowing the user to understand that a change has occurred.

We also want to make sure these state changes don’t rely on color alone, to best accommodate people experiencing color blindness and/or low vision. Here’s how a color-only state change might look to a person with Deuteranopia, commonly known as Red-Green colorblindness:

I purposely removed the underline and the browser’s native focus ring from the link in the video to better illustrate the issue of discoverability. When trying to tab around the page to determine what is interactive, it isn’t immediately obvious that there is a link present. If colorblindness is also a factor, the state change when hovered won’t be apparent—this is even more apparent with the addition of cataracts.

:focus-within

:focus-within—a focus-related pseudo class selector with a very Zen-sounding name—can apply styling to a parent element when one of its children receives focus. The focus event bubbles out until it encounters a CSS rule asking it to apply its styling instructions.

A common use case for this selector would be to apply styling to an entire form when one of its input elements receives focus. In the example below, I’m scaling up the size of the entire form slightly, unless the user has expressed a desire for a reduced animation experience:

See the Pen :focus-within Demo by Eric Bailey (@ericwbailey) on CodePen.

The selector is still relatively new, so I’m sure we’ll get more clever applications as time goes on.

Politics

People also have opinions. Unfortunately, sometimes these opinions are uninformed. Outside the practice of accessibility there’s the prevalent notion that focus styles are "ugly" and many designers and developers remove them for the sake of perceived aesthetics. Sometimes they’re not even aware they’re propagating someone else’s opinion—many CSS resets include a blanket removal of focus styles and are incorporated as a foundational project dependency with no questions asked.

This decision excludes people. Websites and web apps aren’t close-cropped trophies to be displayed without context on a dribbble profile, nor are they static screenshots on a slick corporate sales deck. They exist to be read and acted upon, and there’s rules that help ensure that the largest possible amount of people can do exactly that.

:focus-visible

The fact of the matter is that sometimes people will insist on removing focus styles, and have enough clout to force their cohorts to carry out their vision. This flies in the face of rules that stipulate that focus mechanisms must be visible for websites to be truly accessible. To get around this, we have the :focus-visible pseudo-selector.

:focus-visible pseudo-selector styling kicks in when the browser determines that a focus event occurred, and User Agent heuristics inform it that non-pointer input is being used. That’s a fancy way of saying it shows focus styling when activated via input via other than mouse cursor or finger tap.

The video of this CodePen demonstrates how different styling is applied based on the kind of input the link receives. When a link is hovered and clicked on via mouse input, its underline is removed and shifts down slightly. When tabbed to via keyboard input, :focus-visible applies a stark background color to the link instead.

Chromium has recently announced its intent to implement :focus-visible. Although browser support is currently extremely limited, a polyfill is available. Both it and :focus-within are in the Selectors Level 4 Editor’s Draft, and therefore likely to have native support in the major browsers sooner than later.

You may know :focus-visible by its other name, :-moz-focusring. This vendor prefixed pseudo-selector is Mozilla’s implementation of the idea, predating the :focus-visible proposal by seven years. Unlike other vendor prefixed CSS, we’re not going to have to worry about autoprefixing support! Firefox honors a :focus-visible declaration as well as :-moz-focusring, ensuring there will be parity for our selector names between the two browsers.

One step forward, one step back

Browser support is a bit of a rub—the web is more than just Chrome and Firefox. While the polyfill may provide support where there is none natively, it’s extra data to download, extra complexity to maintain, and extra fragility added to your payload.

There’s also the fact that devices are far less binary about their input types than they used to be. The Surface, Microsoft’s flagship computer, offers keyboard, trackpad, stylus, camera, voice, and touch capability out of the box. WebAIM’s 2017 Screen Reader Survey revealed that mobile devices may be augmented by keyboard input more than you may think. Heuristics are nice, but like analytics, may not paint a complete picture.

Another point to consider is that focus styles can be desirable for mouse users. Their presence is a clear and unambiguous indication of interactivity, which is a great affordance for people with low vision conditions, cognitive concerns, and people who are less technologically adept. Extraordinarily technologically adept people, ones who grok that screen readers and keyboard shortcuts are essentially Vim for a GUI, will want the focus state to be apparent as they use the keyboard to dance across the screen.

Part of building a robust, resilient web involves building a strong core experience that works in every browser. The vanilla :focus selector enjoys both wide and deep support to the degree that it’s a safe bet that even exotic browsers will honor it.

The world is full of things that some people may see as ugly, while others find them to be beautiful. Personally, I don’t see focus styles as an eyesore. As a designer, I think that it’s a foundational part of creating a mature design system. As a developer, describing state is just business as usual. As a person, I enjoy helping to keep the web open and accessible, as it was intended to be.

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If you’d like to learn more about the subject, UX Designer Caitlin Geier has a great writeup on focus indicators.

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