Carbon Design System

Design annotations are needed for specific instances shown below, but for the standard tabs component, also called a tablist, 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

Tabs take at least two tabstops, one for the tablist and one for the tabpanel. When tabbing away from the tablist, focus will either go to the first operable element in the tabpanel or, where there are no operable elements, the entire tabpanel will take focus to support scrolling of its content.

A user reaches the tablist with the Tab key. Pressing the Tab key again moves focus to a link inside the tabpanel's content

The tablist takes a single tabstop then focus moves to the first item in the tabpanel.

A user tabs through a tablist. The focus goes from the tablist to the whole tabpanel, which contains only text.

Where a tabpanel has no interactive items, the focus moves from the tablist to the entire tabpanel.

Arrow keys are used to navigate between individual tab items in the tablist. When the end of the tablist is reached, the focus wraps to the opposite end of the list. For scrollable tablists, where the number of tabs exceeds the horizontal space, the keyboard navigation does not change. The user presses the

Left

Right

arrow key, which moves the focus to the next tab item and, where necessary, scrolls the tablist to keep the selected item visible. For mouse users, clickable arrows appear at the end of the tablist to provide the same scrolling, but these are not needed for keyboard users and they are not in the focus order.

An image pair showing two views of the same tablist of 6 items. The user navigates between tab with left and right arrow keys. If the user presses the left arrow on the first item, the focus wraps around to item 6. Likewise arrowing right from tab item 6 moves to the first tab

Arrow keys move between tabs in the tablist (wrapping from last back to first) and scroll automatically to keep the focused tab visible.

Automatic and manual tablists differ in how the tab items are activated. The following illustration shows what will happen for each variant when a right arrow key is pressed with the Overview tab selected and focused.

For automatic tablists, focus and selection are synchronized. When the user arrows to a tab, it is selected, and the tabpanel under the tab is updated in real time.

Manual tablists allow the user to arrow between the tab items without updating the tabpanel underneath. When the user right arrows, the Overview tab remains selected while focus moves to the Details tab. In order to select the Details tab (and update the tabpanel under the tab), the user would press

Enter

Space

Automatic and manual versions of a tablist with tabs called Overview, Details, and Support. In the first, the Details tab is selected and focused. In the second the Overview tab is still selected and the Details tab has a focus indicator

After pressing the

Right Arrow

key, the second tab is selected in an automatic tablist. For the manual tablist, Details has focus but Overview is still selected. Pressing the Space or Enter key will select Details.

Design recommendations

Indicate which variant to implement

The automatic and manual tablists are visually indistinguishable in a wireframe, so designers should annotate which variant the team has decided to implement. Since the choice primarily concerns technical considerations about potential latency when updating the tabpanel’s information, architects or developers should be involved in the discussion.

Two tabs, one with a pink annotation reading "auto", the other with an annotation "manual"

Annotate whether the tabs should be implemented as automatic or manual.

Development considerations

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

Tabs are implemented as a
```
tablist
```
, with each tab item implemented as a
```
<button>
```
with a role of
```
tab
```
.
The selected tab has attributes
```
aria-selected="true"
```
and
```
tabindex="0"
```
. All other tabs have these attribute values set to
```
"false"
```
and
```
"-1"
```
.
Each tab is associated with its tabpanel through
```
aria-controls
```
.
See the ARIA authoring practices guidance for tabs for more considerations.
For accessibility considerations for manual tabs, see Deciding when to make selection automatically follow focus.

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
Tabs	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.	Test data is either not available or not applicable for this component state.
	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.