What kind of tabs are you referring to. There is certain types of navigation that the search engines could have problems with. This is why it is important to use alternate text navigation when you use more advanced menus such as flash and javascript.
It's depends on the script your using, Google is smart more than enough to read various content including JS but the question is: Will your website/page gets a penalty for such a thing If you don't mind sharing your current tabs script we might help you out more ?
I have not done the design yet. Just want to make sure I don't do something that will not allow content to be included into google. I guess you answered most of my questions, was not sure if google could read javascript to show the content as if a user was clicking