Carbon Design System

No accessibility annotations are needed for UI shell left panels, 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 the keyboard. Carbon incorporates many other accessibility considerations, some of which are described below.

Keyboard interaction

The left panel is comprised of both expandable sections (often called “sub-menus”) and links to content. All items can be reached by

Tab

. Toggling a collapsed section with

Space

Enter

expands it, which reveals additional links. Activating any of the links (with

Enter

) updates the main content area and puts focus back at the top of the page. The link becomes bold to show it is the current page. (It remains in the tab order, but can no longer be activated.)

example of UI shell left panel keyboard interaction

Sub-menus and links are reached by Tab. Space and Enter keys expand/collapse sub-menus, and the Enter key is used to activate links.

Non-persistent left panel

On smaller screens, or if content is zoomed up to approximately 175% magnification, Carbon responsively hides the left panel behind a ‘hamburger’ button, which appears at the start of the UI shell header. Activating the button (with

Space

Enter

) causes the left panel to appear. It overlays the main content area, which often becomes dimmed. The hamburger button’s icon becomes an X, and must be activated to close the left panel.

The hamburger button expands and collapses the left panel.

The left panel can also be implemented as a “Side rail” variant, which slides into view from the left side when reached by keyboard or hovered by mouse. Keyboard interaction within the revealed left panel does not change. When users tab out of the left panel, the side rail slides out of view.

the side rail is shown expanding as the user tabs to the left panel location

The side rail expands on hover or focus, and collapses when not hovered or focused.

Development considerations

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

The left panel is in a
```
<nav>
```
section with
```
aria-label="Side navigation"
```
.
All items in the left panel are in a nested
```
<ul>
```
structure, which provides additional information to assistive technologies.
Each ‘sub-menu’ is implemented as a
```
<button>
```
with
```
aria-expanded
```
.
Activated links receive an
```
aria-current="page"
```
attribute.

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
UI shell	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.	Passes all automated tests with no reported accessibility violations.
	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.

UI shell left panel

What Carbon provides

Keyboard interaction

Non-persistent left panel

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.