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Tree view

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

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 interaction

The tree view takes a single tab stop, with focusing landing on the selected node or the first node of an unselected tree. When trees have focus, arrow keys provide navigation. The Right arrow key expands a closed branch node. If a branch is open, the Right arrow moves into the first child node. Pressing the Left arrow key on an open branch collapses it. Left arrowing on a child moves the focus to the parent branch. Up and Down arrow keys move vertically through open branches and their child nodes. A node or branch is selected by Space or Enter keys.

tabbing into a tree, focus lands on the current item, and tabbing again leaves the tree

The tree view takes a single tab stop.

illustration showing keyboard interaction

Arrow keys operate and move around in the nodes of a tree. Space or Enter selects the current node.

Development considerations

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

  • The component uses a tree role on a ul with all nodes in li given a role of treeitem with a tabindex="-1" and aria-selected="false" (except the currently selected node).
  • All branch nodes contain an aria-expanded attribute.
  • See the ARIA authoring practice Tree View pattern for more considerations.