WCAG 2.4.3
Focus Order
Level AWCAG 2.0
0
automated findings for 2.4.3, across our entire corpus
609 site scans and 941 PDF documents. No engine tests this criterion, ours included, so a site can pass every automated check and still fail it completely.
What it means and how to fix it
For what the criterion formally requires, read the W3C Understanding document.
The closest thing we can measure
Some controls can't be reached by keyboardkeyboard-unreachable21%
The keyboard gets stuck on an elementkeyboard-trap10.3%
A hidden element can still be reached by keyboardaria-hidden-focus11%
One control is nested inside anothernested-interactive9.5%
Each of these detects a specific, unambiguous failure that would also be a failure of 2.4.3. They give a floor, never a total, because they cannot see the cases that need judgement.
What this does not measureLimits of these figures, and where the corpus came from
- Not directly testable on a web page. Related checks bound it, but cannot confirm it.
- In a PDF, this is on our manual-review list: reported for a human to confirm, not decided automatically.
- No automated engine tests focus order directly, and we do not claim to. The figures here come from the keyboard detectors listed above, each of which identifies a specific, unambiguous failure. Treat them as a floor on how many sites 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 2026-09-18.
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.
Run a free scan