When focus indicators is worth the effort

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Focus indicators is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

When it is worth it

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. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How to decide

Focus-visible gives you the best of both. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

What this looks like day to day

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about focus indicators before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Focus-visible gives you the best of both — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.