Three myths about focus indicators

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. A few things about focus indicators that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

“It only matters for big sites”

Removing the focus ring breaks the site for keyboard users. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

“Our platform handles it”

Focus-visible gives you the best of both. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

In practice

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about focus indicators before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A custom indicator is fine, no indicator is not — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.