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Accessibility

Accessibility

A flow is accessible with a keyboard and readable by a screenreader. Nodes and edges are focusable, selectable, moveable and deleteable with the keyboard.

If you have an idea how we can improve the accessibility of React Flow, please feel free to contact us (opens in a new tab).

Built-in Features

Keyboard Controls

  • Nodes and edges are focusable by using the Tab key (tabIndex={0} + role="button")
  • Nodes and edges are selectable by using Enter or Space, un-selectable by using Escape
  • Nodes are moveable with arrow keys (press Shift for increasing velocity)
  • Nodes and Edges get a aria-describedby attribute to describe keyboard controls

You can configure the keyboard controls with the props: nodesFocusable, edgesFocusable and disableKeyboardA11y. nodesFocusable and edgesFocusable (both true by default) need to be true if you want to be able to focus elements with Tab and then select or deselect them with Enter and Escape. If you are setting disableKeyboardA11y={true}, the nodes are not moveable with arrow keys anymore.

Nodes are only moveable with arrow keys when nodesDraggable and nodesFocusable are true (default behaviour).

WAI-ARIA

  • Edges: Default aria-label - overwritable with new Edge option ariaLabel
  • Nodes: ariaLabel option (no default here, because we assume that there might be text inside the node)
  • Minimap component: aria-describedby + title
  • Attribution component: aria-label
  • Controls component: aria-label for controls container and buttons

Better accessible node-based UIs

  • When your nodes don't have textual content, you should provide an aria-label via the node options.
  • You can improve the default aria-label ('from source.id to target.id') of an edge, when your nodes have names that you could use by passing specific aria-labels to the edges.
  • follow best practice WAI-ARIA guides (opens in a new tab) in your application