Carbon Design System

Design annotations are needed for specific instances shown below, but for the standard checkbox component, Carbon already incorporates accessibility.

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

Keyboard interactions

Each checkbox can be reached by

Tab

and selected with

Space

independently. This matches the established HTML interaction pattern.

example of checkbox keyboard interaction

Carbon checkboxes retain expected interactions.

Grouping

For groups of checkboxes, Carbon already provides the code for screen readers to properly detect the set of checkboxes and announce the group label.

Carbon handles the accessibility of grouped checkboxes.

Design recommendations

Design annotations are needed for the following instances.

Meaningful order

Checkboxes can appear in multiple columns. If there is a meaningful order to the items (such as days of the week), annotate whether the tab order is by row or by column. See Specify the tab order.

checkboxes with instruction to ‘navigate in columns'

Annotate if there is meaningful navigation order in rows of checkboxes.

Development considerations

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

Checkboxes are grouped using
```
<fieldset>
```
and
```
<legend>
```
.
A tri-state checkbox that is partially checked (indeterminate) has
```
aria-checked
```
set to
```
"mixed"
```
. See Behaviors on the Usage tab for details.
See the ARIA authoring practices 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
Checkbox	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.

Checkbox