Accessibility Testing : The Tab Key Taught Me More Than Any Manual
If someone had told me before this internship that accessibility testing mostly means putting my mouse away, I wouldn't have believed how much that one change reveals.
The Tab test
One of the simplest checks I picked up was this: click the browser's address bar, then put the mouse aside entirely and navigate using only the Tab key, using Enter to activate links and buttons. It's meant to simulate how someone with a motor disability, who can't reliably use a mouse, would actually experience a site. It sounds almost too basic to be useful, but it exposes problems instantly, links that never receive focus, buttons that are skipped entirely, or a tab order that jumps around the page in a way no sighted mouse user would ever notice.
Accessibility bugs hide behind visual bugs
A lot of what I'd normally have logged as a UI bug turned out to double as an accessibility issue once I looked closer. A "Read More" button that doesn't actually expand content isn't just a broken feature for a mouse user, it's a dead end for someone tabbing through the page expecting that button to do something. A calendar with no real information isn't just visually boring, it offers nothing useful to a screen reader either.
The squish test connects to this too
Shrinking a browser window down to mobile width, something I originally thought of as a responsiveness check, turned out to be closely related to accessibility. Elements that overlap or disappear at smaller widths often create the same kind of problem for someone using assistive technology or a smaller device as they do for someone simply zooming in due to low vision.
Why this deserves its own place in testing
Before this internship, accessibility felt like a specialized, separate discipline, something a dedicated expert would check, not something I'd casually verify myself. Running the Tab test on every project changed that. It takes under two minutes, requires no special tools, and it surfaces real, actionable bugs almost every time. If I had to pick the single highest-value, lowest-effort test in my entire routine, it would be this one.
A habit worth keeping
I now run the Tab test before I even open a mouse-based bug list. It sets a baseline: if a page can't be reasonably navigated without a mouse, that's worth flagging before I even get to the smaller cosmetic issues.
The takeaway
Accessibility testing doesn't require special certification to get started. Sometimes it just requires putting the mouse down and seeing how far you actually get.
