Strong/clear focus highlighting for links and UI elements has great accessibility benefits, but it can also detract from the appeal of a site/application or distract users who are not used to this type of UI feedback. It is keyboard and alternate input device users that benefit most from strong/clear focus highlighting.
I’ve created a new jQuery plugin that allows you to style elements focused via keyboard navigation clearly while leaving elements focused via mouse events with default highlighting (or at least less dramatic highlighting).
This plugin takes the default behaviour of the Chrome browser (as of version 4) and replicates it across all browsers. Chrome gives strong yellow/orange highlighting to links/inputs that have received focus via the keyboard.
Let me know what you think? Is this useful to you? Is there a better way to make the distinction?
By Hugh Barnes April 11, 2010 - 4:13 pm
hey AR: you missed an opening quote on the @href for the Grant Broome link, so my browser is tacking %22 to its target 🙂
By Andrew Ramsden April 12, 2010 - 12:23 am
I guess that’s what I get for hand-coding these things the old fashioned way eh? Validation and link checking probably wouldn’t go astray. Hmm… Wonder if there’s a WordPress plugin for that?