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Data Grid - Accessibility

The Data Grid has complete accessibility support. For instance, every cell is accessible using the keyboard.

Guidelines

The most commonly encountered conformance guidelines for accessibility are:

  • WCAG - Globally accepted standard
  • ADA - US Department of Justice
  • Section 508 - US federal agencies

WCAG 2.0 has 3 levels of conformance; A, AA and AAA (in order of conformance). As meeting WCAG 2.0 level AA guidelines also meets the ADA and Section 508 standards, it's likely the standard that most organizations will want to target.

The WAI-ARIA authoring practices provides valuable insight on how to make the grid highly accessible.

Density

You can change the density of the rows and the column header.

Density selector

To enable the density selector you need to compose a toolbar containing the GridDensitySelector component, and apply it using the Toolbar property in the grid components prop.

The user can change the density of the data grid by using the density selector from the toolbar.

<DataGrid
  {...data}
  components={{
    Toolbar: CustomToolbar,
  }}
/>

To hide the density selector add the disableDensitySelector prop to the data grid.

Density prop

The vertical density of the data grid can be set using the density prop. The density prop applies the values determined by the rowHeight and headerHeight props, if supplied. The user can override this setting with the toolbar density selector, if provided.

<DataGrid
  {...data}
  density="compact"
  components={{
    Toolbar: CustomToolbar,
  }}
/>

Keyboard navigation

The grid responds to keyboard interactions from the user as well as emitting events when key presses happen on the grid cells.

Navigation

Use the arrow keys to move the focus.

Keys Description
Arrow Left Navigate between cell elements
Arrow Bottom Navigate between cell elements
Arrow Right Navigate between cell elements
Arrow Up Navigate between cell elements
Home Navigate to the first cell of the current row
End Navigate to the last cell of the current row
CTRL + Home Navigate to the first cell of the first row
CTRL + End Navigate to the last cell of the last row
Space Navigate to the next scrollable page
Page Up Navigate to the next scrollable page
Page Down Navigate to the previous scrollable page

Selection

Keys Description
Shift + Space Select the current row
Shift + Space + Arrow Up/Down Select the current row and the row above or below
CTRL + A Select all rows
CTRL + C Copy the currently selected row
CTRL + Click on cell Enable multi-selection
Enter Sort column when column header is focused
CTRL + Enter Open column menu when column header is focused

Sorting

Keys Description
CTRL + Click on header Enable multi-sorting

Key assignment conventions

The above key assignments are for Windows and Linux. On macOS, replace CTRL with āŒ˜ Command.