Re: 2.4.7 Focus Visible

On 10/07/2023 20:26, Juliette McShane Alexandria wrote:

> Neither of you (unless I missed it) addressed a 3rd stakeholder. We have 
> end users, we have developers, and then we have the designers or client 
> enforcer of the "Brand" look and feel across the site.
> 
> We are actually working on a site right now where our client (as 
> required by her creative director) is having us implement :focus-visible 
> precisely because the client doesn't want mouse users to experience 
> them. And I quote: "I know I mentioned prior when clicking on the 
> navigation or search the whole word was outline in a box. Its hard 
> because we don’t want to take away from the beauty of the site with the 
> clunkiness of the box. "

Indeed, which is why many in the accessibility community actually fought 
hard FOR the adoption of :focus-visible, since it provided a reasonable 
way to "square the circle". After decades of fighting in vain to 
convince sites/designers/site owners to include focus indicators (rather 
than suppressing everything - see 
https://24ways.org/2009/dont-lose-your-focus, 
https://www.outlinenone.com/, etc to fight for even the most basic of 
focus outline indication), :focus-visible provides an approach that 
actually works for multiple stakeholders, including the (evil etc) 
designers. And as said, since this taps into the browser's own logic of 
when to show the styles, it opens up the possibility of actually 
providing explicit options in user agents for this.

> Also, FWIW, most developers/engineers, unless specifically implementing 
> accessibility, don't even know that WCAG has techniques. Whether or not 
> this was an advisory technique I think would have little to no impact on 
> the vast majority of website builds, at least in the current landscape.

That has been my experience as well.

P
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Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Monday, 10 July 2023 19:50:55 UTC