When should you use Everything works from the keyboard?

Run this on pages with interactive components — menus, carousels, tabs, modals, embedded widgets. Everyone who cannot use a mouse, and every screen-reader user, moves by keyboard; a trap or an unreachable control stops them completely. It catches the regressions that a mouse-driven QA pass can never notice.

It detects controls that announce themselves as clickable — an inline click handler or an interactive role — but cannot see a click handler attached purely by script with nothing in the markup, so a pass is not proof that every control is reachable. Dialogs that hold focus on purpose are listed for review, not failed.

a widget that traps Tab focus; clickable elements that cannot be focused; scrolling regions keyboard users cannot reach

A failure is either a trap — Tab circles a few elements and Escape does not let the reader out — or a control a reader can click but never Tab to. Either one blocks keyboard users from part of the page. Focus held inside an open dialog, or inside an embedded frame, is listed for a person to confirm.

There is no threshold. WCAG 2.1.1 requires every function to be operable from the keyboard and 2.1.2 requires that focus can always be moved away. The walk stops after 250 Tab presses, enough for any page a reader would tab through.

SchemaFirst.org publishes community-governed standards for digital QA. ArbiterQA is a supporter and commercial licensee of those standards; citation does not mean SchemaFirst operates ArbiterQA.