Focus indicators for small teams

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Most advice about focus indicators assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to keep

Removing the focus ring breaks the site for keyboard users. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

What good looks like

Focus-visible gives you the best of both. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. 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

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