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Are my Launchers accessible to keyboard and screen reader users?

Written by Pulkit Agrawal

Every Launcher you publish is built to be usable with a keyboard alone and to work with screen readers, with no setup required on your part. This applies to the live Launcher your users see on your site.


Availability & usage

📌 Applies automatically to every published Launcher — there's no setting to turn this on or off

📌 Covers the Widget, Menu, Items, Sections, Welcome state and Empty state


What can keyboard users do?

A user tabbing through your site can reach the Launcher Widget and press Enter or Space to open or close it. Once it's open, Tab moves between every Item, the search box, and the dismiss button without ever leaving the Launcher — focus is trapped inside it until it's closed.

Inside the list, the Up and Down arrow keys move directly between Items, and Enter or Space activates whichever Item is focused — opening a Tour, following a link, launching a connected integration, or running a Script, the same as a click would.


What does a screen reader announce?

The Menu title reads as a heading, and the list of Items is associated with it, so a screen reader user knows which Launcher they're in. Each Item announces as a link or button with its visible title — not as a heading, which is how earlier versions of the Launcher behaved.

On a checklist-style Launcher, each Item also announces whether it's completed or not completed. An Item that opens a Section announces that it opens a section.

⚠️ If an Item's title or description is formatted with the rich text editor and contains a link inside the text, that Item renders as a non-interactive row instead of a clickable link — a link can't be nested inside another link. Keep links out of an Item's title or description if you want the whole row to open it.


What does a focused item look like?

Every focusable part of the Launcher — the Widget, each Item, the search box, and the dismiss button — shows a visible ring when it's reached by keyboard. Clicking with a mouse doesn't show the ring, so it only appears for the users who need it.

The ring color is fixed rather than pulled from your Launcher's theme, so it stays visible against any background color you choose. If a user's browser or OS is set to a high-contrast ("forced colors") mode, the ring switches to a matching system outline automatically.


👉 You can still adjust the focus ring's position and other Launcher styling with Custom CSS.

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