What is Focus? -- A11ycasts #03
Channel: Chrome for Developers
Date: 2016-08-19

Focus is one of the main pillars of accessibility, but it's also an area that many developers are a little fuzzy on.

Here's a good quote from Web AIM to help explain it: ""When an item has keyboard 'focus', it can be activated or manipulated with the keyboard."" In other words, if an element is currently focused, and you press a key on your keyboard, that keyboard event will be directed at that element. http://webaim.org/techniques/keyboard/#intro

Users can change the currently focused element by pressing either the Tab or Shift-Tab keys. The order that elements receive focus is known as the ""Tab Order"". Making sure you have a consistent, logical tab order is extremely important, especially for users who rely on the keyboard as their primary means of navigating a page.

In this episode we'll show off what it means for elements to be implicitly focusable, and correct some common mistakes relating to mixed up tab orders.

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