ARIA-10: Ensure drag and drop is accessible to keyboard users, and that an alternative is available for assistive technology users.
How to test
- Identify instances of drag and drop interfaces.
- Confirm that all interaction stages (selecting, moving, dropping) are accessible to keyboard users.
- Confirm that an alternative interface is also available (i.e. a means of achieving the same functionality which is accessible to assistive technology).
Exceptions
None
How to fix
Drag and drop can be made accessible to keyboard users, by providing Tab access to the draggable elements and their containers, and defining intuitive keystrokes for selecting and dropping the elements. An example of keyboard accessible drag and drop can be found at https://brothercake.com/reference/drag-and-drop Drag and drop cannot be made accessible to assistive technologies, because the semantics to describe their roles and states were deprecated in ARIA 1.1, and were never fully implemented anyway. Therefore an alternative interface must also be provided, which is accessible to assistive technologies; this does not need to be dynamic in the same way, it simply needs to allow users to achieve the same end result.
Related Standard: 1.3.1 A and 4.1.2 A
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