Keyboard test

How to test your keyboard

1. Press Start keyboard test, or click the keyboard drawing. While capture is on, keys that would normally scroll the page or open a browser feature (Space, arrows, Tab, Backspace, F1–F12) are held back so the page stays put.
2. Press every key once. A key glows while you hold it and stays marked as tested after you let go. The counter shows your progress, for example "73 / 104 keys tested".
3. Keys that never light up are your suspects. Press them a few more times and check the "Keys a browser can't detect" list before you decide one is broken.
4. To leave, press Stop capturing keys or hold Esc for one second. Reset clears the board for another round.

This keyboard tester matches keys by their physical position (the browser's key code), not by the letter printed on them. So it works the same with an English, German or Turkish system layout, and a key is never counted twice just because Shift changes its character.

Layouts and keyboard types

The drawing starts with the layout that fits this page's language. The Layout menu switches between 16 layouts: US and UK English, German QWERTZ, French AZERTY, Italian, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Brazilian ABNT2, Polish, Turkish Q and F, Russian, Japanese JIS, Korean 2-set, Vietnamese and Indonesian. Your choice is remembered in this browser.

Keyboard type changes the shape: Full size with navigation keys and numeric keypad, Laptop with a function row, Fn key and no keypad, and Mac with command and option keys. There are dedicated pages for the laptop keyboard test and the Mac keyboard test.

In Chrome and Edge you may also see Show my system layout. It asks the browser for the layout your computer actually uses and prints those characters on the keys, marked "Labels from your system layout". Handy if you own a layout we did not draw.

On a small screen the drawing splits into Main keys and Arrows & numpad; the view jumps to the right half when you press a key from the other one.

Keys a browser can't see (Fn, Print Screen, Windows key)

Some keys never reach a web page, so they stay dark even on a brand new keyboard. That is not a fault:

• Fn is handled inside the keyboard itself. It changes what the other keys send but is never sent to the computer, so the counter does not include it.
• Print Screen: on Windows the browser only receives the release of the key, so it lights up when you let go, or not at all if a screenshot tool grabs it first.
• Windows key / ⌘: the system may open the Start menu or a shortcut before the page sees the key. On a Mac, keys pressed while ⌘ is held do not report their release; the test marks them as tested anyway.
• Media, volume and brightness keys go to the system, not to web pages.
• Input-method keys such as 한/영, 한자, 変換 or かな may be taken by the system's input method.

To test Fn, hold it and press a top-row key: if F5 lights up instead of a brightness change (or the other way round), Fn works.

Chatter: when one press types two letters

A worn or dirty switch can "bounce" and send a second press right after you release a key. That is why a key types "tthe" now and then. The Chatter (double input) panel flags any new press of the same key that comes within 30 ms after its release; you can move the limit between 10 and 80 ms with the slider. Each flagged key gets its own count.

Press the suspect key 30 or 40 times at a normal pace. A single flag can be a fast finger; real chatter shows up again and again on the same key. Compressed air, a switch cleaner or (on hot-swap keyboards) a new switch usually fixes it.

The Event log shows the last 50 presses with the key, its code, its location (left, right, numpad), whether it was an auto-repeat, and how long it was held in milliseconds. The log stays on this page and is never saved or sent.

Rollover and polling rate

This page checks each key on its own. Two other tests look at the keyboard as a whole:

• The keyboard ghosting and rollover test counts how many keys register at once and shows which combinations your keyboard blocks. That matters in games where you hold W, A, Shift and Space together.
• The keyboard polling rate test estimates how often the keyboard reports to the computer (125 Hz, 1000 Hz and so on) from the timing of your key presses.

Want to know how fast you type instead? Try the typing test.

Laptop keyboard tips

Laptop keyboards fail differently from desktop ones. A whole row or block going dead at once usually points to the ribbon cable or a liquid spill rather than single keys. One key that works only when pressed hard is often a crumb or a bent keycap clip. If nothing works at all, first plug in a USB keyboard: if that one works here, the problem is the built-in keyboard, not Windows or the browser. Our laptop keyboard troubleshooting guide walks through drivers, filter keys and the other usual suspects step by step.

The test runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is recorded or uploaded, and the event log disappears when you close the page. More tools for your setup are on the device tests page.