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Visually hidden

Use these helpers to visually hide elements but keep them accessible to assistive technologies.

Visually hide an element while still allowing it to be exposed to assistive technologies (such as screen readers) with .visually-hidden. Use .visually-hidden-focusable to visually hide an element by default, but to display it when it's focused (e.g. by a keyboard-only user). .visually-hidden-focusable can also be applied to a container - thanks to :focus-within, the container will be displayed when any child element of the container receives focus.

<h2 class="visually-hidden">Title for screen readers</h2>
<a class="visually-hidden-focusable" href="#content">Skip to main content</a>
<div class="visually-hidden-focusable">A container with a <a href="#">focusable element</a>.</div>

Accessibility

  • visually-hidden keeps content in the accessibility tree, unlike display: none and the hidden attribute, which remove it for everyone. Use it for text only a screen reader needs.
  • Do not put anything focusable inside visually-hidden. The focus moves to an element nobody can see. Use visually-hidden-focusable for a skip link or any control that has to appear when it takes focus.
  • Use it to name a control that shows only an icon, to label a table column that has no visible header, or to spell out a direction such as "Previous page".
  • Do not use it to hide content you no longer want. Screen reader users still get it, which makes the page longer, not cleaner.
  • Text hidden this way is still found by in-page search in some browsers, and it is still copied with the surrounding text.