Why focus indicators matters more than it looks

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Focus indicators is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What it costs to ignore

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. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

A custom indicator is fine, no indicator is not. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to watch for

Focus-visible gives you the best of both. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

How to tell if yours is fine

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. 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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.