Keyboard focus should only be shown if the user presses the tab key

[Jono M]

Showing keyboard focus is great for people who use the keyboard, but it can be distracting and unnecessary for people who use the mouse. It would be nice if keyboard focus was not shown by default, but appeared when the user first pressed the tab key (and possibly other keys such as Space and Enter as well).
However, the accessibility implications of this need to be evaluated - it may be discouraged or banned in WCAG.

[Jono M (jonom)]

One way to do this would be something like (in jQuery):

$(function() {
  var focusfunction = function(e) {
    if (e.keyCode == 9) {
      $('body').addClass('showfocus');
      document.removeEventListener('keydown', focusfunction);
    }
  }
  document.addEventListener('keydown', focusfunction, true);
}

And only have focus styles applied under .showfocus (alternatively this could be reversed so the body has a class of hidefocus by default)

[Jono M (jonom)]

An easy way to do this for most cases is to remove outline on :active and :hover, eg.
*:active, *:hover { outline: 0 }
However, this won't work for cases where focus management is used, so either JS would have to be added for that or everything which uses focus management would need to have a pretty focus style defined.

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Patch for "master" branch: https://reviews.mahara.org/3017

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

Patch 3017 was abandoned

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

The concept of this wishlist bug is to cripple existing accessibility for the normal user (when using mouse) to make it easier for them when using keyboard. This bug has been abandoned as breaking something to fix somthing else is never a good idea.