Carbon Design System

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

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.

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