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Re: How important in practice is WCAG Technique G165: Using the default focus indicator for the platform?

for

From: Guy Hickling
Date: Oct 7, 2019 2:12PM

Birkir wrote, and Patrick added to it:-

>> "Rolling your own is good if you want consistency with your brand, your
site, across user agents, going with user agent defaults is good if you
don't want to worry about WCAG and think that providing a custom indicator
could confuse people who are used to a certain user agent."

There is also another scenario where rolling your own focus indicator is a
must. It's an absolute necessity for anyone who spends money on SEO. I
posted a week ago on Twitter (https://twitter.com/GuyHickling though it's a
tweet that seems to have gone unnoticed unfortunately) that it's complete
nonsense to spend loads-a-money on SEO in the hope that maybe you'll get
more visitors to your site, but then throw away a load of people who have
actually got to the site simply because you can't be bothered to give them
a decent focus indicator to navigate by!

Getting back to G165 as mentioned in the original question, there are a
small number of WCAG Techniques that I think should be struck from the
record, or at least have Notes added to strongly deprecate them. G165 is
one of them. (And G183 is another and that also, interestingly, is to do
with a visual matter.) People read G165 and immediately think "Ok, so
that's alright then, I can leave it to the browser"! It isn't alright from
where I'm standing, my sight is going down the pan at a rate of knots and
it gets increasingly difficult for me see the browser focus indicators. So
I know many people with worse sight than mine will have the greatest
trouble with them. The WCAG was written for those people, and its very
unfortunate that

Finally, on the original question which concerned ".....the question is
really about whether defining a focus indicator will adversely affect users
who define their own". Provided the user includes !important on the style
settings in their stylesheets, that overrides anything the website author
can do. See the W3C's CSS cascade rules about that at
https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html.

Regards,
Guy Hickling