In reply to Drew Jaynes.

I'm a little confused. I suppose a theme may cause a strange behavior with the form but I have had no issues tabbing where I need to go in the comments form to enter any of the input fields. No shift-tabbing unless desired to make an edit. Can you provide an example site with the behavior you describe? I really would like to understand this. I must say I don't use screen readers as often as I should in testing so I cannot comment on those at this time. "Tabindex" improperly used can screw up any form. I don't believe WP core uses tabindexes in the main comments.php & comments-template.php so in most instances the theme is the culprit (unless some other WP Core page makes a change to the tabindex of the comments form or a plugin).