Three myths about keyboard navigation

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. A few things about keyboard navigation that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

“It only matters for big sites”

Everything clickable must be reachable by tab. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

“Our platform handles it”

Custom widgets are where keyboard support usually breaks. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The short version

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
• Everything clickable must be reachable by tab — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.