![]() Knowing the upsides and downsides of each technique will help us choose the one we need when we need it. There are several ways we can hide content in CSS and HTML, each with its own pros and cons. So when we hide it, we want to make sure we do so accessibly. We’ll do that in a later section.Īnd since the image doesn’t replace the checkbox semantically, the checkbox needs to remain accessible. This will allow me to use the siblings selector in CSS to select the SVG and style and animate it when the checkbox is focused and interacted with (checked and unchecked). To address the first point, I placed the SVG image after the checkbox in the DOM. The SVG image is not going to replace the checkbox semantically. The SVG is used to create an image of a checkbox.Since the SVG is going to replace the checkbox visually, it also needs to visually convey state (checked, unchecked, disabled), as well as behavior (focus in particular, and hover if you need that).So, if you think about it, we’re technically going to style the label - or a part of it.Ī couple of important things to note here: The checkbox label now contains the label text, the checkbox itself, as well as the SVG image that will represent our checkbox visually. Since the checkbox is going to go inside the, the SVG will too. I also like this approach because it makes the checkbox a more self-contained component that I can customize with CSS variables and use anywhere I need it. Placing the checkbox inside the label increases the overall clickable area, which makes it more usable. I like to wrap my checkboxes inside their labels. …not to mention that inlining an SVG has overall more advantages than any other embedding techniques and that you could make use of, such as animations. you lose the ability to optimize the SVG for user-controlled environments, such as Windows High Contrast Mode, so you could end up risking the accessibility of the checkbox in those environments.you lose the ability to animate the SVG, which is one of the major benefits of using SVG to begin with, and.You could, of course, use the SVG as a background image (on the checkbox label), yes but it comes with drawbacks such as: So, in order to style a checkbox with SVG, we need to add the SVG to the markup somewhere. So the SVG is just a visual replacement of the checkbox. Using SVG, we don’t style the checkbox itself - we hide the checkbox and use an SVG to create a checkbox image. Setting the foundation in the markupĮven though styling a checkbox using modern CSS features is currently possible, using SVG to create custom checkboxes remains, in my opinion, the most flexible, powerful, and accessible way. Note that while I will be talking about checkboxes in this article, this technique applies to radio buttons and any other interactive form elements that you may want to restyle using an image replacement, including file inputs, for example. So, in this article, I will cover the different techniques for hiding elements, how each of them affects the accessibility of the content, and how to properly hide checkboxes and radio buttons taking their own accessibility and usability considerations into account to make sure we aren’t leaving any users out. I learned this when I used the same technique myself to create my own accessible checkboxes a couple of years ago and my friend Scott O’Hara kindly pointed out during one of our chats that they weren’t entirely accessible because they weren’t discoverable by all screen reader users, particularly those navigating by touch. But while this technique works for some content, it’s not suitable for hiding interactive elements like radio buttons and checkboxes that have other accessibility and usability considerations. All of the articles I read use one or another variation of the visually-hidden utility class which is usually used to hide content visually while keeping it screen reader-accessible. I’ve recently come across quite a few articles on the topic of accessibly styling checkboxes and radio buttons. So, when we attempt to hide the checkbox we want to style, we need to make sure that the checkbox remains accessible and interactive. But an SVG image is, at the end of the day, just an image, so while it can visually replace a checkbox, it doesn’t really substitute for it - the user still needs a checkbox to interact with. So we’ve been hacking our way around styling them by hiding said elements with CSS and visually replacing them with pseudo-elements or an SVG image - SVG, of course, being the more flexible, powerful, and accessible replacement. ![]() Checkboxes and radio buttons are two common examples of interactive form elements that we desperately want to have full control over styling but we don’t.
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