Focus appearance updates

Hi everyone,

Based on the survey and the call today, we agreed to move Focus Appearance to AAA.

If we can make some further modifications, we should work out what those are.

It isn’t clear what would count as ‘substantive’, as we are creating requirements rather than features. Moved to AAA we have reduced the requirement in practice.

Another fairly straightforward change would be to remove the ‘part 1’ of the SC. That would at least make it smaller, if not simpler. It would not affect conformance, as anything that passes part 1 would pass part 2.

I can see two other changes that could be appropriate at AAA.

  1.  Simplify the ‘size’ bullet, e.g. remove the 4 times shortest side measure.
  2.  Increase the size requirement to 2 CSS pixel thick perimeter.

All of those together would leave us with:

When the keyboard focus indicator<https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#dfn-focus-indicator> is visible, an area of the focus indicator meets all the following:
·         is at least as large as the area of a 2 CSS pixel<https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#dfn-css-pixels> thick perimeter<https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#dfn-perimeter> of the unfocused component or sub-component, and
·         has a contrast ratio of at least 3:1 between the same pixels in the focused and unfocused states, and
·         has a contrast ratio of at least 3:1 against adjacent non-focus-indicator colors, or is no thinner than 2 CSS pixels.
(Plus the exceptions.)

Does anyone have a different approach to this, or would like to make a case for retaining the 4 x shortest side metric?

I think the overall impact, for those aiming for AAA, would be a stronger push toward outlines, and thicker outlines as well.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

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@alastc / www.nomensa.com<http://www.nomensa.com>