Carbon Design System

No accessibility annotations are needed for selects, 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 also incorporates other accessibility considerations, some of which are described below.

Keyboard interaction

A select component is reached by

Tab

and opened with

Space

, or the

Up

Down

arrow keys. The currently selected option will have focus. The arrow keys are also used for navigating between options. Users can jump about in the list by pressing individual letter keys, which will reposition to the first option beginning with that letter. Options are selected with

Space

Enter

keys, which also close the select. Pressing

Esc

closes a select without changing the selected option.

Selects are reached by Tab. Space and arrow keys open the list of options.

illustration showing an open select with the focus on the Previewer option while the Editor option is already selected

The arrow keys navigate the open list of options, with the Space or Enter keys selecting the option with focus and closing the list. Esc closes the list without changing the option.

Development considerations

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

Carbon uses the combined attributes
```
disabled
```
,
```
hidden
```
, and
```
selected
```
in order to make a default prompt such as “Choose an option” not appear in the list of options when the select is open.
The component is built on the HTML
```
select
```
element and has limited styling, with most of the visual appearance coming from the browser.

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
Select	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.
Fluid select	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.	Test data is either not available or not applicable for this component state.

Select

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.