Tabs

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.

Like content switchers, tablists can be automatic or manual. In both instances, the tablist takes one keyboard tab stop. 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.

Arrow keys are used to navigate between individual tab items but 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 or Space.

Especially with contained tabs, it is possible for the number of tab items in the tablist to exceed the available horizontal space.Carbon offers the ability to scroll sideways within the list. For keyboard users, the navigation is the same. The user presses the Left or Right arrow keys, which moves the focus to the next tab item and where necessary scrolls the tablist to keep the selected item visible. When the end of the tablist is reached, the focus wraps to the opposite end of the list. 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. This is interaction is demonstrated on the React storybook for the Contained Full Width tabs variant.

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 largely concerns technical considerations about potential latency when updating the tabpanel’s information, architects or developers should be involved in the discussion.

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