Focus Order
Keyboard focus moves through content in an order that preserves meaning and operability, not an arbitrary DOM or tabindex order.
Why it matters
If focus jumps from a page header to a footer link and back to mid-page content, a keyboard or screen reader user experiences the page as scrambled — reading order and interaction order stop matching what they see.
Detected by Openwell's judgement pass
This requires actually understanding whether a sequence 'makes sense,' not just detecting that a tabindex value exists. Openwell's judgement pass evaluates the captured tab-order trace against the visual layout; it is not an axe-core rule.
Fails
<input tabindex="3" placeholder="Email">
<input tabindex="1" placeholder="Name">
<button tabindex="2">Submit</button>Positive tabindex values override natural DOM order, sending focus Name → Submit → Email — before the user has even seen the email field.
Passes
<input placeholder="Name">
<input placeholder="Email">
<button>Submit</button>No explicit tabindex; focus follows natural document order, which matches the visual reading order top to bottom.
Openwell finds violations like this one across your whole site, clusters them by the component that caused them, and generates a fix that's re-validated before you see it.
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