Focus Order
When someone navigates by keyboard, focus needs to move through the page in an order that makes sense — not jump around unpredictably.
What it means
Every time someone presses Tab, focus moves to the next interactive element — a link, a button, a form field. That sequence should follow the same logical order a sighted user would read the page in. It doesn't have to be a strict left-to-right, top-to-bottom march, but it does have to preserve the meaning and relationships of your content, so the order itself doesn't cause confusion.
Why it matters
Keyboard users build a mental model of your page as they tab through it. If focus suddenly jumps from a header down to a footer link and back, or skips past a whole section, that model breaks — and for someone who can't just glance at the screen to reorient, that's genuinely disorienting rather than just annoying.
What our scan checks for
- Elements with a positive tabindex value (tabindex="1", "2", and so on) — a common anti-pattern that overrides the browser's natural order with a manually-numbered one, which is easy to get out of sync as a page evolves and often produces exactly the jumbled sequence this criterion warns against.
How to fix it
- Avoid positive tabindex values entirely. If an element needs to be reachable by keyboard but isn't naturally focusable, use tabindex="0" and let it sit in its natural place in the page order.
- If the actual visual/DOM order is the problem, fix the order in the markup rather than patching it over with tabindex numbers.
- Use tabindex="-1" only for things you want to be focusable programmatically (like a skip-link target) but not part of the regular tab sequence.
See where this shows up on your site
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