Try the Tab Test on your website

Why just Tab and Enter

It’s tempting to also allow Shift+Tab to go backward, or the arrow keys, or Space. Leaving those out is deliberate. Some real keyboard and switch users only move forward, either because their device doesn’t support reverse navigation comfortably or because it’s simply slower and more error-prone for them. If your site only works when you can jump back and forth to find the thing you missed, that’s worth knowing too, not excusing.

Sticking to Tab and Enter alone also makes the test brutally simple to repeat. No setup, no extension, no screen reader licence. Anyone on your team can run it in the two minutes it takes to read this guide.

What to watch for

• Can you see where you are, every single time? As you press Tab, something on screen should visibly change, a border, an outline, a background colour, something. If you genuinely can’t tell where focus has gone, that’s a missing or invisible focus indicator, and it’s one of the most common failures on real sites.
• Does the order make sense? Tabbing should move roughly in the order a sighted person would read the page: top to bottom, left to right in most layouts. If it jumps around unpredictably, or lands somewhere you can’t explain, that’s a focus order problem.
• Can you reach everything that looks clickable? Every link, button, and form field a mouse user can click should be reachable by Tab. If a button is visibly there but Tab skips straight past it, a keyboard user simply can’t use it.
• Does anything trap you? Keep pressing Tab. If focus starts cycling round the same handful of elements and never reaches the rest of the page, you’ve found a keyboard trap, and it can leave someone stuck with no way forward at all.
• Does Enter actually do the thing? Land on something that looks like a button and press Enter. If nothing happens, it may look like a button but not behave like one underneath, a common result of styling a <div> to look clickable instead of using a real <button>.
• Does a closed menu stay closed? If your site has a dropdown or mobile menu, keep tabbing past it without opening it. You shouldn’t be able to reach its links at all until the menu is actually open. If you can, its contents are exposed to keyboard users even while invisible, which is a genuinely common finding in real audits.

What this test won't catch

Be honest with yourself about the limits here, because they matter. This test tells you nothing about whether a screen reader announces things correctly, whether your colour contrast passes, whether your alt text is meaningful rather than just present, or whether a form makes sense when read aloud rather than looked at. Passing the Tab Test is a genuinely good sign. It is not the same as passing WCAG 2.2 AA.

Think of it as a smoke test: quick, free, and a strong early warning sign. If it turns something up, that’s exactly the kind of thing a full manual audit, with a keyboard and a screen reader together, digs into properly. See our guide on what a quick oversight audit and a full audit each cover.

Try it here first

Before you run it on your own site, try it on our homepage. Click anywhere on the page, then tab through it with nothing but Tab and Enter. Every link and button should show a visible outline, the order should follow the page sensibly, and nothing should trap you or go silent. If you find something that doesn’t, we’d genuinely like to know, since we hold ourselves to the same standard we audit everyone else against.

Common questions