• May 14, 2020

Better (more accessible) active link styling

Until this morning, I always styled the current link in my navigation menu by doing this.

<ul class="nav">
	<li><a href="/about">About</a></li>
	<li class="active"><a href="/articles">Daily Tips</a></li>
	<li><a href="resources">Learn JS</a></li>
</ul>

.nav .active a {
	border-bottom: 0.125em solid #fa7176;
	color: #272727;
}

It gives users a clear visual indication that “you are here.”

Well… sighted users, that is. If you’re visually impaired or use a screen reader to navigate the web, it tells you nothing.

I just learned that I should have been using [aria-current] to indicate the current page in the navigation, like this.

<ul class="nav">
	<li><a href="/about">About</a></li>
	<li><a aria-current="page" href="/articles">Daily Tips</a></li>
	<li><a href="resources">Learn JS</a></li>
</ul>

You can even hook into the attribute for styling purposes, so I can drop the .active class altogether.

.nav [aria-current] {
	border-bottom: 0.125em solid #fa7176;
	color: #272727;
}

Léonie Watson has a great article on the [aria-current] attribute, and I suggest you go read the whole thing.

Most notably, you can use it for more than just the current page (formatting adjusted for space).

The aria-current attribute can be given one of a predefined set of values (enumerated tokens):

• page represents the current page within a set of pages;
• step represents the current step within a process;
• location represents the current location within an environment or context;
• date represents the current date within a collection of dates;
• time represents the current time within a set of times;
• true represents the current item within a set;
• false does not represent item within a set.

You can dig deeper into the [aria-current] attribute, with some great examples, in Léonie’s detailed article.