Visible keyboard focus: Crawl Audit check 177

Short answer: keyboard users need to see which link or button they're on as they press Tab. Check 177 looks for focus styles written into the page itself, and warns if it finds none. Most sites keep these styles in separate CSS files, so a warning here is a prompt to test, not proof of a problem.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: the HTML contains :focus or :focus-visible, usually in an inline <style> block.
• Warning: it doesn't.

It can't read your stylesheet files, so sites with perfectly good focus styles still warn. Check 138 looks at the same topic from a different angle and passes any site with a stylesheet. Neither can tell you what a keyboard user actually sees.

What W3C says

• WCAG 2.4.7: "Without a focus indicator, sighted keyboard users cannot operate the page."
• W3C lists styling outlines "in a way that removes or renders non-visible the visual focus indicator" as a recognised failure (F78). That's the common outline: none mistake.

How to test

• Load the page, click in the address bar, then press Tab repeatedly. You should always be able to see where you are.
• Check menus, form fields and buttons in pop-ups too.
• If you removed the browser's outline, make sure something just as visible replaced it.

:focus-visible {
  outline: 2px solid currentColor;
  outline-offset: 2px;
}

On devmarde.com

Our focus style lives in our stylesheet, which draws a ring around whatever has keyboard focus. Because it isn't written into the page itself, this check warns for us.

Sources

• W3C, Understanding 2.4.7 Focus Visible (updated 6 September 2026), checked 6 October 2026.