WCAG 2.1.3
Keyboard (No Exception)
3.3%
of the 609 sites we scanned fail this
Ranging from 1.9% of US local government to 14.7% of Shopify DTC stores. Pooled across five targeted cohorts, so treat it as a convenience sample rather than a rate for the web.
What it means and how to fix it
What 2.1.3 covers
- Partly detected: Everything in 2.1.1, without the exception for path-dependent inputAt AAA the exception 2.1.1 allows for genuinely path-dependent input (freehand drawing, say) no longer applies. We cannot tell which failures were relying on that exception, so our coverage here is narrower than at Level A.
- No engine can detect this: Whether an input really is path-dependentThis is the judgement the criterion turns on, and it is not mechanical.
Of that, one failure is detectable automatically, and these are what the rates on this page measure. Each needs its own fix. The percentage is the share of all 609 scanned sites affected. These do not sum to the 3.3% above: a site can fail more than one of them, and most that fail any fail several.
- A scrollable area can't be reached by keyboard4.4%
Keyboard users cannot scroll content-rich regions that lack keyboard focus.
What it looks like in code
HTML<div style="max-height: 300px; overflow-y: auto">
<!-- long content, no way to scroll it from the keyboard -->
</div><div tabindex="0" role="region" aria-label="Terms and conditions"
style="max-height: 300px; overflow-y: auto">
<!-- same content, now reachable and scrollable with the arrow keys -->
</div>A region that scrolls needs a tab stop, or its content below the fold cannot be reached without a mouse. The label matters too: a focus stop with no name is announced as nothing.
Shown for A scrollable area can't be reached by keyboard. Both halves are written rather than harvested: this failure lives in HTML rather than in the markup, so there is no page element to show.
For what the criterion formally requires, read the W3C Understanding document.
How often it fails
Share of scanned sites in each cohort. These are five targeted studies, not a random sample of the web, so read the contrast between cohorts rather than any one figure as a web-wide rate.
Who fails it mostOne cut by retail vertical
By retail vertical
Groups smaller than 8 sites are not shown: a rate over a handful of sites moves by tens of points on a single result.
What this does not measureLimits of these figures, and where the corpus came from
- These are five targeted cohorts, not a random sample of the web. Per-cohort rates are the figure to quote; the pooled rate is a convenience sample.
- Denominators count sites that produced a result. Sites that were blocked or errored are excluded rather than counted as passing.
- Occurrence counts are floors: the engine records at most 25 occurrences of a rule per page.
- The EU and Indian cohorts retained only the primary success criterion per finding, so a rule mapping to several criteria contributes to one of them in those two cohorts and to all of them in the other three.
| Cohort | Scanned | Attempted |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify DTC stores | 75 | 75 |
| US local government | 158 | 221 |
| US healthcare providers | 208 | 218 |
| EU e-commerce | 107 | 170 |
| Indian financial services | 61 | 72 |
Corpus generated 2026-09-18.
Check your own site
A free scan reports WCAG 2.1.3 alongside everything else, with the exact elements that fail.
Run a free scan