Navigating Gimp help using only keyboard
 

Is there a way that I can read the Gimp help pages without using the mouse? There are those nice arrows at top and bottom and the home symbol at the bottom. I can click on them, of course, but what I want to do is to, say, move to the next page, move up in the topic tree, or move to help home using just the keyboard.

I care about this because I find it both awkward and irritating to constantly switch my focus between the keyboard and the mouse, and scrolling down using just the mouse, while possible, is in itself awkward compared to using the up and down arrows. The Firefox keyboard shortcuts don't solve the problem in any obvious way (I've looked at them).

There's lots of help on Gimp around, but I can't find help on Gimp help.

For help, press the F1 key. Help will open up in a browser. Then use the tab key to work down through the menu, and Enter key to open the file you want to read.

A different problem
 

You're talking about how to get to the help. I'm talking about navigating the help once I get there. (The arrows I want to access show up in orange bars at the top and bottom of the help screen.)

You and I apparently have very setups in our respective Suse installations. In mine, in the Gimp, I press F1 for help (which opens in Firefox). I then use tab to move down the table of contents, shift+tab to move up, and <enter> to view the help topic I want.

Navigating outside the table of contents
 

Yes, those keys work nicely for navigating the table of contents. But they don't work that way in the actual help pages with text on them, as far as I can tell. I can get to the two top arrows with tab and enter: tab-enter gets the left arrow and moves to the structurally previous page, while tab-tab-enter gets the right arrow and moves to the structurally next page. But I haven't found anything like that for getting to the home page, symbolized by the house at the bottom.

I'm using gimp 2.2.14, and I don't see the arrows you mention. I see words like prev up down next and home. I just press the first letter of the word on the keyboard.

Two versions of help
 

Aha! There are two versions of help, the built-in one and the online one. The online one is the definitive one (see Appendix D of the built-in one -- and correct the URL there to change http to http:). You were looking at the built-in one, which indeed works as you say, but is not quite as reliable.