What Is Focus Order Visualizer?
Focus Order Visualizer maps the keyboard tab order of interactive elements on a web page, showing you exactly where focus moves as a user tabs through your site. It’s an essential accessibility testing tool for ensuring that keyboard-only users and screen reader users can navigate your interface logically.
How to Use This Tool
Enter a URL and the tool renders the page and overlays numbered indicators on every focusable element (links, buttons, inputs, etc.) in their actual tab sequence. You can step through the focus order to spot illogical jumps, missing focus targets, and elements that should be focusable but aren’t. Everything runs in your browser.
Why Use Focus Order Visualizer?
Tab order issues are invisible during mouse-based testing but create major barriers for keyboard users. This tool makes the focus sequence visible at a glance, helping you catch accessibility problems that automated scanners often miss. It’s free, requires no installation, and runs entirely client-side. For a detailed walkthrough, see our step-by-step guide.
Common Use Cases
Auditing an SPA where the route changes have moved focus into unexpected places between transitions. Diagnosing why screen-reader users skip the "Add to cart" button entirely on a product page where the visual order suggests it should come right after the gallery. Validating that a modal dialog traps focus correctly when it opens and returns focus to the triggering element when it closes.
Reviewing a long-form form for tab-order quirks introduced by responsive reordering — CSS flexbox and grid can visually move elements without touching DOM order, so the keyboard path may not match what the eye expects. Confirming a redesigned navigation menu maintains a sensible reading path. Verifying that carousel arrows, dropdown triggers, and toggle buttons all participate in the tab sequence (or are correctly excluded, when that's the right call).
How We Compare
Browser DevTools have built-in accessibility tools that surface focus order, but they show one element at a time and require manual stepping through the tab sequence. The browser extensions axe DevTools and Accessibility Insights overlay focus order on the page but require an install and a permissions prompt. Both are engineering-team tools that don't travel well to design reviews where the audience may not have DevTools experience.
This visualizer renders the tab order as numbered overlays directly on the page in the browser, so the entire reading path is visible at once and easy to share via screenshot. Positive tabindex values are flagged separately because they often cause exactly the bugs accessibility reviews are looking for. For verifying the visual contrast accessibility piece alongside, see WCAG compliance checker.
One review pattern that scales: take a screenshot of the focus-order overlay on each key page (signup, checkout, dashboard, settings) and attach to the design QA ticket. Reviewers without DevTools experience can spot tab-order regressions from the image alone, which makes accessibility review more inclusive of non-engineers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Built by Derek Giordano · Part of Ultimate Design Tools