Make an HTML element non-focusable

Is it possible to make an HTML element non-focusable?

I understand that a list of elements that can receive focus can be defined and that a user can navigate through these elements by pressing a Tab key. I also see that it is up to the browser to control this.

But maybe there is a way to make certain elements non-focusable, say I want a user to skip a certain <a> tag when pressing a Tab.

<a href="http://foo.bar" tabindex="-1">unfocusable</a>

A negative value means that the element should be focusable, but should not be reachable via sequential keyboard navigation.

See also: developer.mozilla.org

To completely prevent focus, not just when using the tab button, set disabled as an attribute in your HTML element.

<link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet"/>

<input class="form-control" type="text"> Click this, you can see it's focusable.

<input class="form-control" type="text" readonly>  Click this, you can see it's focusable.

<input class="form-control" type="text" readonly tabindex="-1">  Click this, you can see it's focusable. Not tab'able.

<input class="form-control" type="text" disabled>  Click this, you can see it's <strong>not</strong> focusable.

In order to make an prevent an element from taking focus ("non-focusable"), you need to use Javascript to watch for the focus and prevent the default interaction.

In order to prevent an element from being tabbed to, use tabindex=-1 attribute.

Adding tabindex=-1 will make any element focusable, even div elements. This means when a user clicks on it, it would likely get a focus outline, depending on the browser..

You would ideally, want this:

function preventFocus(event) {
  event.preventDefault();
  if (event.relatedTarget) {
    // Revert focus back to previous blurring element
    event.relatedTarget.focus();
  } else {
    // No previous focus target, blur instead
    event.currentTarget.blur();
  }
}

/* ... */

element.setAttribute('tabindex', '-1');
element.addEventListener('focus', preventFocus);

TabIndex is what your looking for: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/prop_html_tabindex.asp.

When you set a tabIndex value to -1 you will skip it when tabbing through your form.

For the element you do not want to be focused on tab, you have to put the tabindex as a negative value.

I used focusable="false", because tabindex="-1" was not working in IE.

In case you are looking for a global solution:

<a href="#" class="__nofocus" tabindex="-1">Link</a>

document.body.addEventListener('focusin', (e) => {
  if (e.target.classList.contains('__nofocus')) {
    e.relatedTarget ? e.relatedTarget.focus() : e.target.blur();
  }
});

It should work for anchors, buttons and anything else that can receive focus by default. Don't forget to set tabindex="-1" as well as the element would be unpassable by Tab-key navigation.

Making a focusable-by-default HTML element a non-focusable one isn't possible without JavaScript.

After diving into focus-related DOM events, I've came up with the following implementation (based on the @ShortFuse's answer, but fixed some issues and edge cases):

// A focus event handler to prevent focusing an element it attached to
onFocus(event: FocusEvent): void {
    event.preventDefault();

    // Try to remove the focus from this element.
    // This is important to always perform, since just focusing the previously focused element won't work in Edge/FF, if that element is unable to actually get the focus back (became invisible, etc.): the focus would stay on the current element in such a case
    const currentTarget: any | null = event.currentTarget;
    if (currentTarget !== null && isFunction(currentTarget.blur))
        currentTarget.blur();

    // Try to set focus back to the previous element
    const relatedTarget: any | null = event.relatedTarget;
    if (relatedTarget !== null && isFunction(relatedTarget.focus))
        relatedTarget.focus();
}

// Not the best implementation, but works for the majority of the real-world cases
export function isFunction(value: any): value is Function {
    return value instanceof Function;
}

This is implemented in TypeScript, but could be easily adjusted for plain JavaScript.