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Kayce Basques
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GitHub
Alexandra Klepper
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Bluesky
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:
Open the Console.
Click
Create Live Expression.
Learn more in Watch JavaScript values in real-time with Live Expressions.
Type document.activeElement.
Click outside of the Live Expression interface to save.
The value after document.activeElement is the result of the expression. Since
that expression always represents the focused element, you can 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 Open in Elements panel to show the
element in the DOM Tree in 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.
Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last updated 2025-12-14 UTC.
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