Keyboard navigation: a practical guide

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. This guide covers what keyboard navigation actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

Why it matters

Everything clickable must be reachable by tab. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

How we handle it

Focus order should follow visual order. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Custom widgets are where keyboard support usually breaks. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Everything clickable must be reachable by tab
• Focus order should follow visual order
• Custom widgets are where keyboard support usually breaks
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Warning signs

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

A reasonable first step

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.