Tagged “focus”

GitHub have recently done some good work on improving keyboard navigation for (and general usability of) their focusable elements such as links, buttons and form controls by improving focus indication. And then they wrote a short-but-sweet article about it, then tweeted to share that and their work is getting lots of positive recognition from all the right people. Nice job all round, GitHub!

Here are five bite-sized and practical chunks of advice for creating accessible forms.

1. Always label your inputs.
2. Highlight input elements on focus.
3. Break long forms into smaller sections/pages.
4. Provide error messages (rather than just colour-based indicators)
5. Avoid horizontal layout forms unless necessary.

Léonie Watson explains how the HTML tabindex attribute is used to manage keyboard focus. Of particular interest to me was a clarification of what tabindex="-1" does (because I always forget).