Is there any reason not to change the style of web radio buttons and check boxes?

Question

It's still very difficult to change the visual look of HTML radio buttons and checkboxes using CSS.

For example, changing the check box's border-color does nothing on major browsers.

Is there a UX reason for this? Keeping it the same for consistency? Or is this just something that's been neglected?

It's a decent question, I'm not sure to the reason but I'm 99% sure I saw something recently about a proposal to allow more control over native styling. The crazy thing with the current state of affairs is that often people want to style their inputs to match their designs, but many of these implementations can affect accessibility negatively. — dougajmcdonald, Jun 28, 2019 at 6:55

Socrates Kolios · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-03 11:01:31Z

A little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.

Standards are difficult to change especially when you have to work with multiple companies and browsers. With every change, you have to ensure browser compatibility for all available versions for all available browsers, you have to consider accessibility, touch behaviour etc.
As technology advances (think progressive web apps, grids etc.) more standards and updates to HTML & CSS are needed, so elements that are quite "basic" tend to move down in priority especially when you have to consider point 1 above.

So I would say it's less "being neglected" and more "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

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