Five mistakes teams make with keyboard navigation

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit keyboard navigation.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Everything clickable must be reachable by tab
• Focus order should follow visual order
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Custom widgets are where keyboard support usually breaks. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What to do next

In practice

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about keyboard navigation before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Custom widgets are where keyboard support usually breaks — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.