Closing pop-ups and modals: Crawl Audit check 139

Short answer: a modal (a box that opens over the page, like a sign-up form or image viewer) must be easy to close: a visible close button, the Escape key, and focus returned to where the visitor was. Check 139 is informational and always passes: it notes whether close controls were found.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: an element labelled "close", or a close button inside something named "modal".
• Pass: none, with a note that no modals were detected.

It can't open your modals to test them. Try each one with a keyboard.

What the W3C pattern says

• "When a dialog opens, focus moves to an element inside the dialog."
• "Escape: Closes the dialog."
• When it closes, "focus returns to the element that invoked the dialog".
• "It is strongly recommended that the tab sequence of all dialogs include a visible element with role button that closes the dialog, such as a close icon or cancel button."

The close button is a tap target too: WCAG 2.5.8 asks for at least 24 by 24 pixels (check 104).

The simplest way

The HTML <dialog> element, opened with showModal(), handles moving focus and the Escape key for you in modern browsers.

<dialog id="signup">
  <button type="button" aria-label="Close">×</button>
  ...
</dialog>

See check 109 for when not to use a pop-up at all.

Sources

• W3C, Dialog (Modal) pattern and Understanding 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum), checked 6 October 2026.