Put the mouse down and press Tab. That is the entire method, and it finds more real problems than any scanner.
It takes about twenty minutes on a small site, costs nothing, needs no software, and tests things no automated check can judge. If you only ever do one accessibility test, do this one.
Who depends on it
Not a small group. Keyboard-only use covers people with motor impairments and tremors, people with repetitive strain injuries, screen reader users, people using switch access or voice control, and anybody whose trackpad has just died.
The walkthrough
Open your home page. Click once on the address bar, then press Tab.
1. Can you always see where you are?
Press Tab repeatedly. At every stop you must be able to see which element has focus.
If focus disappears, something has removed the outline. Find this in your CSS:
*:focus { outline: none; }and delete it. If you want a nicer ring, replace it rather than removing it:
:focus-visible {
outline: 2px solid #5b3fe6;
outline-offset: 3px;
}WCAG 2.2 requires focus indicators to have 3:1 contrast against what is next to them, so a pale grey ring on a pale grey background still fails.
2. Does the order make sense?
Focus should move roughly the way the page reads: top to bottom, left to right.
If it jumps to the footer and back, something is wrong. The usual culprit is a
positive tabindex, which forces an element to the front of the tab order.
<!-- Breaks the order for the whole page -->
<button tabindex="3">Submit</button>
<!-- Fine -->
<button>Submit</button>Use tabindex="0" to make something focusable and tabindex="-1" to make it
programmatically focusable. Never a positive number.
3. Can you reach everything, and operate it?
Every menu, every slider control, every tab, every accordion, every modal.
If you can reach it but cannot activate it with Enter or Space, it is probably
a div pretending to be a button. The fix is to use a real <button>.
4. Can you get out of things?
Open a modal or a cookie banner. Can you close it with Escape? Can you Tab out of it, or does focus escape behind it onto the page underneath?
A modal that traps focus permanently is a dead end. A modal that does not hold focus at all is nearly as bad.
5. Is there a skip link?
Press Tab once on a fresh page load. The first thing to appear should be a “Skip to content” link.
Without one, a keyboard user tabs through your entire navigation on every single page before reaching anything.
6. Does the menu work?
Dropdown navigation that only opens on hover is unusable without a mouse. Submenus must open on focus too.
7. Try the forms
Tab through your contact form. Can you reach every field, select every radio, tick every checkbox, and submit? When validation fails, does focus move to the error, and is the error announced rather than only coloured red?
8. Try a purchase
If you sell anything, complete a whole purchase with the keyboard. This is where sites break, and it is the journey an EAA complaint is most likely to be about.
What to write down
Keep it simple. For each problem: the page, what you pressed, what you expected, what happened.
That is a bug report. It is also the evidence that you tested, which is worth having.
Where automation fits
Automated checks find the mechanical causes fast — a positive tabindex, a
link that is not reachable, an element hidden from screen readers but still
focusable, a scrollable area a keyboard cannot reach. Those are all checks in
Accessibility Remediation.
What they cannot tell you is whether the order makes sense, whether you can complete a task, or whether the focus ring is visible against your particular background. That is the twenty minutes.
This is the division the plugin is explicit about in What it cannot do.
Questions people ask
Which keys should I be using?
Tab and Shift+Tab to move, Enter to activate links and buttons, Space for buttons and checkboxes, arrow keys inside radio groups, selects and menus, Escape to dismiss.
Does this replace screen reader testing?
No, but it finds a large share of the same problems much faster, and it is a sensible thing to do first.
My theme removes focus outlines. Can I fix that without editing it?
Yes. The focus-outline site-wide fix restores a visible ring, and
strip-positive-tabindex puts the tab order back into reading order. Both are
listed in
Site-wide fixes.
To clear the mechanical faults before you start tabbing, the plugin is free on WordPress.org.