The real cost of ignoring focus indicators
We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Nobody bills you for neglecting focus indicators. The cost shows up somewhere else.
Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- Removing the focus ring breaks the site for keyboard users
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
A custom indicator is fine, no indicator is not. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Turning this into a decision
Focus-visible gives you the best of both. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
What this looks like day to day
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
- Removing the focus ring breaks the site for keyboard users — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.