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Breadcrumb

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

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 page link in the breadcrumb is reached by Tab and activated by Enter. The current page, if listed in the breadcrumb, is not a link. If the breadcrumb is truncated, the ellipsis button for the overflow menu is in the tab order. See overflow menu for details on its keyboard operation.

example of breadcrumb keyboard interaction

The breadcrumb's links are reached by Tab and activated by Enter.

Accessibility issues are tracked in the Carbon Design System GitHub repository.

Labeling and regions

Carbon implements each page link as a list item inside a navigation region named “breadcrumb.” The ellipsis symbol is a button called “more breadcrumbs” which opens the overflow menu.

aria-label designates the navigation region 'breadcrumb' and the ellipsis button 'more breadcrumbs’

Carbon provides the accessibility information about the breadcrumb's structure.

Development considerations

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

  • The Carbon implementation uses an html5 <nav> element; this could also be achieved with a “navigation” landmark on a <div>.
  • Each link in the breadcrumb is implemented as an unordered list item so that screen readers provide more context.
  • The visual / separators do not need to be text (Carbon uses CSS) and are not intended to be navigable.