Carbon Design System

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

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 keyboard. Carbon also incorporates other accessibility considerations, some of which are described below.

Keyboard interaction

Each toggle is in the tab order. Pressing

Enter

Space

changes the toggle’s state between off and on.

illustration showing tab and other keyboard operation

Toggles are reached by Tab and activated by Space or Enter keys.

Redundant state information

Carbon’s default toggle uses both color and text to indicate on or off. Where space constraints make a smaller toggle desirable, Carbon adds a tickmark to the toggle’s “on” state so that if the text is not included, the component’s on/off state can be distinguished without relying on use of color. The state is also captured programmatically for users who cannot see or understand the visual indicators.

The alert toggle shows "off" and "on" to indicate state

Do include the on/off text for the toggle's state whenever space permits.

Toggles in the Alert column of a table show their "on" state with a green tickmark

Where space is confined, use the tickmark variation in lieu of on/off text.

Design recommendations

Design annotations are not needed, but keep the following point in mind.

Do not change the toggle’s label based on its state

It is essential that designers distinguish between the text indicating the on/off state of the toggle and the text that is the toggle’s label. The label’s text should not change based on the on/off state.

the same 'Alerts' toggle keeping its label in both states

Do keep the label consistent. Only change the state text between On and Off.

The toggle changing its label from 'Alerts on' to 'Alerts off'

Do not change the label text as a way of indicating the toggle's on/off state.

Development considerations

Keep this in mind if you’re modifying Carbon or creating a custom component.

Toggle is implemented as a button with a role of
```
switch
```
.
“On” and “off” text is
```
aria-hidden
```
; the state of the toggle is surfaced with
```
aria-checked
```
set to “true” or “false”.
The toggle’s
```
label
```
is set with
```
for
```
See the ARIA authoring practices guidance on switch 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
Toggle	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.

Toggle