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Re: focus indicators and usability studies

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 16, 2014 6:59AM

2014-06-16 15:04, Nancy Johnson wrote:

> Let me know if I am wrong, but there was a period a few years back
> that Eric Meyers original reset.css removed the focus.

I'm not sure exactly which version is Eric Meyer's original reset.css,
but the version that is very often cited, from 2007, has nothing to do
with focus:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

Indirectly, stylesheets meant to remove browser differences in a bulky
way, usually called "reset CSS" or "CSS reset", might indirectly remove
visual focus indication. For example, removing outline would often
remove at least part of the indication. But Meyer's 2007 version does
not do anything with outline. It does set border: 0 for a large number
of elements, including <a>, so if your code tries to indicate focus with
border and your page uses that reset.css, you need to override this effect.

> Our client has a few legacy sites developed at the time. I did
> accessibility testing on these sites and indicated one of the reasons
> it didn't pass WCAG 2.0 AA because of lack of focus, I indicated the
> very low Level of Effort it would take to fix the issue.

I wonder what the problem might have been. I can imagine a site removing
the default focus indicators in graphic browsers, the dotted outline,
and using borders for the purposes instead. But surely it would then
need to set the border property in manner that overrides reset.css in
this respect. But maybe there is a clever way to run into a trouble
here. :-)

Yucca