Carbon Design System

Design annotations are needed for specific instances shown below, but for the standard button component, Carbon already incorporates accessibility.

What Carbon provides
Design recommendations
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 interactions

Buttons can be reached by

Tab

and selected with

Space

Enter

Carbon buttons retain expected interactions.

Behavior

Icon-only butttons, which do not persistently display a text label, expose their label on hover and focus. When icon-only buttons are used to open menus, they are treated as separate components in Carbon. See Dropdown and Overflow menu.

a pointer hovering over an icon-only button shows the name ‘Close’

Icon-only buttons have their labels exposed automatically on hover and focus.

an activated button reveals 3 options in a menu

Buttons that open menus are separate components in Carbon.

Design recommendations

Design annotations are needed for the following instances.

Labeling

When buttons do not have a persistently displayed label, they must be annotated with a label that will be exposed on hover or focus.

a button with a pencil icon has an annotation ‘label=Rename’

Annotate the label for icon-only buttons so the proper tooltip appears.

Development considerations

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

Where links have been ‘repurposed’ as a button, they need to be coded so the
```
Space
```
key can also activate (since links are only activated by default by
```
Enter
```
).
Toggle buttons can be accessibility supported by changing the value of
```
aria-pressed
```
between
```
"true"
```
and
```
"false"
```
or with a change of name that reflects a change in the icon shape (for example: “play” / “pause” )
See the ARIA authoring practices for more considerations.

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
Button	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.

Button