WCAG 2.4.3
Focus Order
Level AWCAG 2.0
5.8%
of the 941 county government PDFs we scanned fail this
This is a document figure, not a website one. None of our 609 site scans produced an automated finding for this criterion, which says what the engines can test on a web page, not that websites pass it. How we scanned the PDFs
What it means and how to fix it
What 2.4.3 covers
- We detect this: Interactive controls the Tab key cannot reach at allA control left out of the focus order has no position in it. Reported under 2.1.1 as well.
- We detect this: Focus landing on content hidden from assistive technology
- We detect this: PDF pages with links or form fields that set no tab orderWithout one, a reader may tab through them in an order unrelated to the page. Setting it to follow the tags is the fix.
- No engine can detect this: A focus order that exists but makes no senseWhether the sequence preserves meaning is a judgement about the content. It needs a person tabbing through.
For what the criterion formally requires, read the W3C Understanding document.
What this does not measureLimits of these figures, and where the corpus came from
- No automated engine tests focus order directly, and we do not claim to. The website figures come from the keyboard detectors listed above, each of which identifies a specific, unambiguous failure. The PDF figure counts documents whose pages with links or form fields set no tab order at all. Treat both as a floor on how many have a focus-order problem, never as the total.
- 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 2026-10-05.
Check your own site
A free scan runs the related checks that bound WCAG 2.4.3, but it cannot confirm it. Treat a clean result as the start of a manual review, not a pass.
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