RE: Focus appearance - history

Hi Oliver,

Requiring a particular form of focus indicator goes beyond what we’ve discussed for this SC in 2.2. It is too late in the process to add requirements now, although it could feed into future guidelines.

Also, I’m not convinced that it would be the best thing to do. For example, the gov.uk pages have a slightly different indicator (yellow background and 3px thick underline), and I think you’d struggle to show that is less visible than an outline.

Kind regards,

-Alastair


From: Keim, Oliver

Hi Jonathan,

I agree and I would also appreciate a focus visuals requirement which is more clearly focusing on consistency and supporting learned visual patterns. This would help providing a "continuum" as expressed in this mail thread.

The focus is, in general, a well established visual pattern in desktop and mobile operating systems, so it would be great if web applications would/could pick up these patterns and provide consistent visuals to expose the current focus position.

Secondly, I need to express my concern about the "one of two" pattern discussed. If you have two options and one option has focus and the other does not - it is still not clearly recognisable which option has focus, without interaction, if the focus is not rendered with consistent visual patterns: If focus is rendered inconsistently, e.g. one time it provides an outline outside the control, one time its rendering the outline inside, the user will not immediately be able to precisely judge which is the focused one.

In my opinion the focus should be recognisable without forcing the user to do anything, not moving a mouse, not using a keyboard key.
A recommendation conforming to the software usability standard ISO 9241-171 would also provide a consistent pattern for requirement definition:
ISO 9241-171 (Accessibility), paragraph 9.2.2. "Provide high visibility keyboard focus and text cursors" defines a requirement that a user can find a focus without need for interaction. If I remember correctly an old version also had the additional text "within one second".

I would greatly appreciate consistency for focus visuals on at least a set of web pages, better consistent to the OS environment.

Best regards, Oliver.


Oliver Keim
Accessibility Expert, Development Architect