Carbon Design System

No accessibility annotations are needed for menus, but keep these considerations in mind if you are modifying Carbon or creating a custom component.

What Carbon provides
Development considerations

What Carbon provides

Carbon bakes keyboard operation into its components, improving the experience of blind users and others who operate via keyboard. Carbon incorporates many other accessibility considerations, some of which are described below.

Keyboard interaction

The menu is reached by

Tab

. When the menu is open, the first item takes focus. Use the

Up

and

Down

arrow keys to navigate between menu items.

Menu is reached by Tab and when opened, the first menu item takes focus. Arrow keys move focus.

Pressing

Space

Enter

on a focused menu item activates it and collapses the menu. Pressing

Space

Enter

on a submenu opens it. A submenu can also be opened and closed using the right and left arrow keys respectively. When the menu or submenu is open, the first item takes focus. An activated menu item can have different results depending on its functionality. If the item is a link, it launches the selection. If the item is selectable, it selects or deselects the item. The menu item retains its selected or unselected state when the menu is opened again.

Space and Enter keys activates, selects, or deselects the menu item with focus. A submenu is opened and closed with the right and left arrow keys respectively.

Development considerations

Keep these considerations in mind if you are modifying Carbon or creating a custom component.

Each menu, including nested menus, are
```
ul
```
elements with
```
role="menu"
```
.
Menu items are
```
li
```
elements with
```
role="menuitem"
```
.
If a Menu item contains a sub-menu, it is given
```
aria-haspopup="true"
```
and
```
aria-expanded
```
of true or false depending on if the sub-menu is open/visible.
Selectable menu items are given
```
role="menuitemcheckbox"
```
.
Menu item groups are
```
li
```
elements with
```
role="group"
```
.
Menu item radio groups get
```
role="menuitemradio"
```
.
Menu items with really long labels can get truncated depending on the screen size. This label will be exposed by a browser rendered tooltip on hover or focus.
Menu implements the menu design pattern defined in the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG).

Accessibility testing status
For every latest release, Carbon runs tests on all components to meet the accessibility requirements. These different statuses report the work that Carbon has done in the back end. These tests appear only when the components are stable.

Latest version: | Framework: React (@carbon/react)

Component	Accessibility test	Status	Link to source code
Menu	Test(s) that ensure the initial render state of a component is accessible.	Passes all automated tests with no reported accessibility violations.	GitHub link
	Tests that ensure additional states of the component are accessible. This could be interactive states of a component or its multiple variants.	Automated or manual testing has been temporarily deferred.
	Tests that ensure focus is properly managed, and all interactive functions of a component have a proper keyboard-accessible equivalent.	Passes all automated tests with no reported accessibility violations.
	This manual testing ensures that the visual information on the screen is properly conveyed and read correctly by screen readers such as JAWS, VoiceOver, and NVDA.	A human has manually tested this component, e.g. screen reader testing.

Menu

What Carbon provides

Keyboard interaction

Development considerations

Accessibility testing statusFor every latest release, Carbon runs tests on all components to meet the accessibility requirements. These different statuses report the work that Carbon has done in the back end. These tests appear only when the components are stable.

Accessibility testing status
For every latest release, Carbon runs tests on all components to meet the accessibility requirements. These different statuses report the work that Carbon has done in the back end. These tests appear only when the components are stable.