The real cost of ignoring keyboard navigation
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Nobody bills you for neglecting keyboard navigation. The cost shows up somewhere else.
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- Everything clickable must be reachable by tab
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
Focus order should follow visual order. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
Where to go from here
Custom widgets are where keyboard support usually breaks. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
In practice
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
- Focus order should follow visual order — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.