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Accordion

How it works

Accordions are a vertically stacked list of headings. They reduce the need for users to scroll through a lot of content, as the headings act as interactive elements which show or hide the related content.

Tab and Shift-Tab are used to navigate forward and backward through each accordion header and all focusable elements in the accordion should be included in the tab order. Enter or Space expand and collapse each accordion panel.

The two main components are:

  • Accordion heading which is the interactive title or thumbnail for each section. The headings can hide or show content.
  • Accordion panel is the content associated with an accordion heading.

Considerations

This component strives to follow WCAG 2.1 (level AA) guidelines, and care must be taken to ensure this effort is maintained when the component is implemented across other projects. This section offers advice to that effect:

  • Accordion titles should be descriptive; it should be obvious what information the content will contain.
  • Ensure each tab button element is wrapped by a div element with a p-accordion__heading class and the role=heading attribute. This heading should have an appropriate aria-level label, depending on its position in the hierarchy of the page.
  • If the accordion panel associated with the heading is visible, then the button within the heading div must have aria-expanded=”true”
  • The heading button should have an aria-controls attribute set to the ID of the related accordion panel.
  • Add the aria-labelledby attribute to the accordion panel, set to the ID of the button heading.
  • Avoid keyboard traps when adding components to the accordion panel. For example, the user expands an accordion, but is unable to tab to the next focusable element.

Resources