Stylesheets for some sites hide button focus cues

Question

On Mathematics, Arqade, Electrical Engineering, and Ask Different (to list those which I have noticed), the styling on form submit buttons (such as “Post Your Question” and “Save Edits”) removes all cues indicating that the button has the focus. This is a minor usability problem for me — I like to operate forms by keyboard and when I tab past the text fields there is no cue for whether the focus has gone to the button, or some other control — and I am given to understand it is a larger (accessibility) problem for others.

I request that the stylesheets for those sites which have this problem be changed such that there is some focus indication. I don't care whether it is the browser default or something custom.

(Since I originally wrote this question, I note that some more recently launched/designed sites, such as skeptics.SE and scifi.SE, don't have this problem. Good! But the old instances are still around.)

Answer 1

Thanks for reporting this. This issue affects most of the themed sites. A pretty easy fix was to remove { outline: none; } rules from the CSS for those sites. The result is that the form submit elements exhibit the browser default behavior for focus. Sometimes that's very apparent, and sometimes it's still pretty subtle, but this is probably the best fix without needing a lot of tedious design work for not a whole lot of gain.

This will be in the next build.