Radio button

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.

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

A group of radio buttons takes a single tab stop. Carbon does not require any item to be selected by default, and the first item will always take focus in case of no selection. The user changes the selected radio button using the arrow keys (up/down or left/right). Pressing Tab again will move focus out of the radio button group to the next component.

Example of tabbing into a radio button group and arrowing between selections

A radio button group is a single tab stop and radio buttons are selected using arrow keys.

Carbon surfaces the labeling of radio buttons and groups to screen readers and other assistive technologies. Carbon also provides state and context information, such as the number of items in the radio button group.

"color group, Purple radio button checked, 2 of 3"

JAWS screen reader output, based on the information provided by Carbon.

Keep this in mind if you’re modifying Carbon or creating a custom component.

Carbon uses fieldset and legend to group and label sets of radio buttons.
Carbon uses label and for to programmatically connect radio buttons with their labels.
Required radio button groups must be identified programmatically, either via the label or with aria-required.
See the ARIA authoring practices for more considerations.

Component	Accessibility test	Status	Link to source code
Radio Button	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.

Help us improve by providing feedback, asking questions, requesting features, or leaving any other comments on GitHub.

What Carbon provides

Keyboard interaction

Labeling and states

Development considerations

Feedback