Your keyboard is the fastest accessibility test you have

The most reliable accessibility test costs nothing and takes two minutes. Load your page, put the mouse down, and press Tab. Then keep pressing it. You are now navigating the way millions of people do every day: keyboard-only, switch-only, or with a screen reader that moves through focusable elements one at a time.

Tab

moves forward through focusable elements

Shift+Tab

moves back

Enter / Space

activates the focused control

Esc

should close what you opened

The three things you will find

First, controls you cannot reach at all. A button built as a clickable div is invisible to Tab, because a div is not a control. You will press Tab and the focus ring will jump straight past it.

The fix is almost always to use the real element. A button is focusable, operable with Enter and Space, and announced as a button, for free.

Second, focus you cannot see. If your CSS removes the focus outline and puts nothing back, a keyboard user has no idea where they are on the page. Never ship outline: none without a visible replacement. Third, and worst, focus that gets trapped: a modal opens, and Tab cycles inside it forever, or a custom widget swallows focus and never gives it back.

If you cannot complete your own signup form with the mouse unplugged, neither can a keyboard user.

Elena Marsh

Tallyn catches these in the markup: the clickable div with no role, the positive tabindex that scrambles the order, the outline removed with no replacement. But the two-minute Tab test is the habit that keeps them out in the first place, and it is the one thing on this list you can do before you finish reading it.