Keyboard navigation

There are many different ways to use the web besides a mouse and a pair of eyes. Users navigate for example with a keyboard only or with their voice.

All the functionality, including menus, links and forms should work using a keyboard only. This is essential for all assistive technology to work properly. The only way to test this, at the moment, is manually. The best time to test this is during development.

How to keyboard test:

Tab through your pages, links and forms to do the following tests:

  • Confirm that all links can be reached and activated via keyboard, including any in dropdown submenus.
  • Confirm that all links get a visible focus indicator (e.g., a border highlight).
  • Confirm that all visually hidden links (e.g. skip links) become visible when in focus.
  • Confirm that all form input fields and buttons can be accessed and used via keyboard.
  • Confirm that all interactions, buttons, and other controls can be triggered via keyboard — any action you can complete with a mouse must also be performable via keyboard.
  • Confirm that focus doesn’t move in unexpected ways around the page.
  • Confirm that using shift+tab to move backwards works as well.

Resources

Template: Excerpt (Generated)

This is the post content. It should be displayed in place of the auto-generated excerpt in single-page views. Archive-index pages should display an auto-generated excerpt of this content. Depending on Theme-defined filters, the length of the auto-generated excerpt will vary from Theme-to-Theme. The default length for auto-generated excerpts is 55 words, so to test the excerpt auto-generation, this post must have more than 55 words.

Be sure to test the formatting of the auto-generated excerpt, to ensure that it doesn’t create any layout problems. Also, ensure that any filters applied to the excerpt, such as excerpt_length and excerpt_more, display properly.

Template: Sticky

This is a sticky post.

There are a few things to verify:

  • The sticky post should be distinctly recognizable in some way in comparison to normal posts. You can style the .sticky class if you are using the post_class() function to generate your post classes, which is a best practice.
  • They should show at the very top of the blog index page, even though they could be several posts back chronologically.
  • They should still show up again in their chronologically correct postion in time, but without the sticky indicator.
  • If you have a plugin or widget that lists popular posts or comments, make sure that this sticky post is not always at the top of those lists unless it really is popular.