What to ask your agency about keyboard navigation

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on keyboard navigation, these questions are worth asking early.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Everything clickable must be reachable by tab. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Custom widgets are where keyboard support usually breaks. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

How to tell if yours is fine

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. 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

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.