Old question but if anyone is interested - you can stop the tab navigation from breaking your slides by setting the slide's CSS visibility to hidden unless it is the current slide. tabIndex -1 didn't work for me. I am using Swiper in a React project and I have a state variable 'isVisible' that controls css transitions and such. Simply adding a conditional class making the slide visible if isVisible is true or invisible if isVisible is false stopped the errant tab navigation and did not have any unfortunate side effects.