I was looking through Microsoft’s design system Fabric the other day and came across an interesting component in the Utilities section called FocusTrapZone. FocusTrapZone is a React component that is used to trap focus inside any HTML element.
What does trapping focus mean?
Trapping focus means that when a person uses the Tab key to navigate through focusable elements inside an area, focus will always be moved from the last focusable element back to the first, and from the first focusable element to the last when using Shift + Tab to navigate backwards. Trapping focus effectively means creating a loop where a user can only tab to any focusable element w…
I was looking through Microsoft’s design system Fabric the other day and came across an interesting component in the Utilities section called FocusTrapZone. FocusTrapZone is a React component that is used to trap focus inside any HTML element.
What does trapping focus mean?
Trapping focus means that when a person uses the Tab key to navigate through focusable elements inside an area, focus will always be moved from the last focusable element back to the first, and from the first focusable element to the last when using Shift + Tab to navigate backwards. Trapping focus effectively means creating a loop where a user can only tab to any focusable element within a given container element, for example a modal dialog.
Why would you want to create a focus trap?
Focus trapping is a technique used to help restrict navigation to a particular region for people who use a keyboard to navigate. Take the modal dialog example I just mentioned. When a user activates a dialog, focus should be moved to the dialog element and subsequent presses of Tab should move focus to the next focusable element inside the dialog and so on.
But, what happens when the used reaches the last focusable element in the dialog? The answer is that the dialog remains active/open in the middle of the screen with the underlying content dimmed, while focus moves outside the dialog to the next focusable element in the document. That’s not a great user experience, which is why restricting or trapping focus is important.
For more info on focus requirements for dialogs and other common UI components, I highly recommend digging into the ARIA Authoring practices.
Focus Trapper Web Component
I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about Web Components recently and have been itching to build one that was actually useful. So, I decided to see what it would take to bundle up focus trapping functionality into my own Web Component from scratch.
The demo below shows how to use the focus-trapper element. When the trapped attribute is added, focus will cycle through all the focusable elements inside.
<focus-trapper trapped>
<button type="button">Button onebutton>
<button type="button">Button twobutton>
<button type="button">Button threebutton>
focus-trapper>
<script type="module">
import FocusTrapper from './path/to/FocusTrapper.js';
customElements.define('focus-trapper', FocusTrapper);
script>
The idea of being able to build functionality that makes it easier to create more accessible interfaces into a Web Component is super interesting to me. Abstracting away all keyboard event listening and focus management into a declarative component that I can use in my HTML sounds like an ideal solution. I’m really interested to explore other tricky keyboard navigation concepts crucial to making UI components accessible that could similarly be rolled up into a Web Component.
Focus trapper on GitHub
I put the code for my focus-trapper Web Component up on GitHub. I’m sure there are some bugs, and it’s mostly an experiment at this point, but I’d love to hear any feedback.