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Making Links Keyboard Accessible: Tips for Firefox and Safari

Ensure Your Links Respond to Key Presses on Macs

Nevin Katz
Better Programming
5 min readMar 14, 2023

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Image by LEEROY Agency from Pixabay

One important aspect of website accessibility is making interactive elements navigable via the keyboard, as not all users can use a mouse, a trackpad, or a touchscreen to navigate a website.

At any given time, there is one element the user is set up to interact with via the keyboard — either on the website or on the browser itself. This element is said to have focus. A link with focus typically has a blue outline.

Ideally a user should be able to switch focus from one link to the next using the TAB key, and move back using SHIFT+TAB. Pressing RETURN on a link with focus should bring the user to the destination that the link points to.

While links respond this way by default in most browsers, there are two browsers on Macs where this is not the case: Safari and Firefox.

  • Firefox will not allow tabbing between two links unless the user goes to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts and checks one of two options, depending on the OS: all controls or keyboard navigation to move focus between controls.
  • Safari will prevent tabbing through links unless you go to Safari Preferences > Advanced and check the option entitled Press Tab to

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Nevin Katz
Nevin Katz

Written by Nevin Katz

Developer at EDC. I write about web development and biology. Subscribe at https://buttondown.email/nevkatz for article roundups.

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