info icon

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

Coming soon! The accessibility information for the menu button and combo button is going to be updated soon.

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

Each overflow menu is in the tab order and is activated by

Space

Enter

. When the menu is open, the first item takes focus. Focus is moved between menu items with the

Up

and

Down

arrow keys.

Space

Enter

activates the item with focus (which causes focus to go somewhere else and the menu to close).

Esc

collapses the menu and puts focus onto the menu button.

example of overflow menu keyboard interaction

Overflow menus are reached by Tab. Space and Enter keys open the menu as well as activating menu items with focus.

illustration showing an open menu with the focus on the first item, and the arrow and Esc keys called out

When opened, the first item in the menu takes focus. Arrow keys move focus, Esc closes the menu.

Development considerations

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

Overflow menus are buttons with
```
aria-haspopup
```
set to “true”.
The overflow menu is named with
```
aria-label
```
.
Each menu item is an
```
li
```
in a
```
ul
```
.
Each list item contains a button with
```
role="menuitem"
```
and
```
tabindex="-1"
```
. See the ARIA authoring practices on menubutton 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
Menu buttons	Test(s) that ensure the initial render state of a component is accessible.	Automated or manual testing has been temporarily deferred.	GitHub link
	Tests that ensure additional states of the component are accessible. This could be interactive states of a component or its multiple variants.	Automated or manual testing has been temporarily deferred.
	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.

Menu buttons

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.