Focus Management

Designing so that people with disabilities can use a thing, and the standards that make it checkable.

Checking that people using screen readers, keyboards, magnification, or other assistive technology can actually use an interface, through a mix of automated scans and hands-on testing.

Attributes that describe roles, states, and relationships to assistive technology when HTML cannot.

A panel that slides up from the bottom of a phone screen to show extra content or choices, often draggable between heights, placed where thumbs can reach it on large phones.

A panel that rotates through several slides in one spot, popular on home pages as a way to give everyone's content top billing, and notorious for low engagement and accessibility problems.

A keyboard-summoned search box that finds and runs any command by typing part of its name, giving power users speed without forcing every feature into menus.

An isolated rendered instance of a component, usable as documentation, a workbench, and a test.

The HTML attribute that makes an element directly editable, and the surface behind most rich-text editors.

A menu of actions for the thing under the pointer, opened by right-click or long press, which saves travel and narrows choices but is invisible until summoned, so it should never be the only route to an action.

The live tree of objects a browser builds from a document, and the surface every UI framework writes to.

The visible outline or highlight showing which element on a screen will receive keyboard input, essential for anyone who doesn't use a mouse, and for years routinely removed by designers who found it unattractive.

Confining keyboard focus inside a modal surface so it cannot wander behind it.

A real browser driven programmatically without a visible window.

A component supplying behavior and accessibility with no styling of its own.

Making every interactive affordance reachable and operable without a pointer.

A window that blocks the rest of the interface until it is dealt with, useful for decisions that truly demand attention and overused for almost everything else.

Rendering an element into a different part of the document than its logical parent.

An operating-system preference signaling that animation should be minimized, for real medical reasons.

Software that turns an interface into speech or braille for people who can't see the screen, which navigates by structure rather than reading top to bottom, and exposes every shortcut a sighted design took.

Using elements for their meaning, so the document conveys structure without extra description.

A web app that loads one HTML page and then rewrites it with JavaScript as the user navigates, trading a slower, heavier first load for app-like transitions afterwards.

The nested coordinate system that decides what paints above what, and why z-index often does nothing.

Offsetting the start of sibling animations so a group reveals in sequence.

A window manager that arranges windows automatically into non-overlapping tiles and is driven mainly from the keyboard, trading freeform placement for zero layout effort.

A brief, non-blocking message that slides in to confirm an action or report a background event, then disappears on its own.

A small label that appears when hovering or focusing an element, useful for naming icons and easy to make inaccessible, unreachable on touch, or covered by other layers.

A browser API that animates between two states of a page, or between two pages, by snapshotting the old and new views and morphing between them.