Keyboard navigation for small teams

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Most advice about keyboard navigation assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

What to keep

Everything clickable must be reachable by tab. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

What good looks like

Custom widgets are where keyboard support usually breaks. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

What this looks like day to day

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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.