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Accessibility

React Complex Tree provides several features to make the tree component accessible to all users.

DOM structure compliant with W3C's recommendations​

The W3C defines specific guidelines for how a tree view should be structured to be accessible. The guideline is fulfilled by the default render methods that are provided by React Complex Tree. If you implement custom render methods, you will need to make sure that the general DOM structure still complies to the guidelines (i.e. by using nested ul-lists), however even then React Complex Tree does most of the work for you by providing most DOM attributes such as aria-tags, role attributes and event handlers as props for the render methods. Look into the documentation on custom render hooks to find out more.

Complete Control via keybindings​

All features can be accessed via keybindings, including drag and drop, searching and renaming. Find out more in the documentation on keyboard bindings.

Live descriptors​

A visually hidden live section is rendered at the top of the tree that explains the state of the tree to screen readers. Screen readers are notified about updates to the state of the tree. This is particularly important when using drag-and-drop features via keyboard interactions.

Live descriptors are displayed by default. They can be turned off by providing a showLiveDescription prop to the environment with the value false. They can be further customized via additional props.

Custom descriptor texts​

Provide a liveDescriptors prop to the environment to define custom descriptor texts. How descriptors are named is described in the respective API document. This is helpful for localizing the descriptors to different languages.

When defining descriptors, the following substrings can be used as variables that are replaced during runtime:

  • {treeLabel}: the label provided to the tree component
  • {keybinding:bindingname}: a specific keybinding. bindingname needs to be a key of the KeyboardBindings interface.
  • {dragTarget}: If currently dragging, a description of the drag target.
  • {dragItems}: A list of item titles of items that are currently being dragged, seperated by commas.
  • {renamingItem}: If currently renaming an item, the title of the item that is being renamed.

Custom Keybindings​

If custom keybindings are provided to the tree environment, live descriptors do not need to be updated as they automatically include the correct bindings.