Track element focus

Kayce Basques
Kayce Basques

Suppose that you're testing the keyboard navigation accessibility of a page. When navigating the page with the Tab key, the focus ring sometimes disappears because the element that has focus is hidden. To track the focused element in DevTools:

  1. Open the Console.

  2. Click Create Live Expression Create Live Expression.

    Creating a Live Expression.

    For more information, see Watch JavaScript values in real-time with Live Expressions.

  3. Type document.activeElement.

  4. Click outside of the Live Expression UI to save.

The value that you see below document.activeElement is the result of the expression. Since that expression always represents the focused element, you now have a way to always keep track of which element has focus.

  • Hover over the result to highlight the focused element in the viewport.
  • Right-click the result and select Reveal in Elements panel to show the element in the DOM Tree on the Elements panel.
  • Right-click the result and select Store as global variable to create a variable reference to the node that you can use in the Console.