aria-collapsible

A lightweight, dependency-free JavaScript module for generating progressively-enhanced collapsible regions using ARIA States and Properties.

Key Features

• Uses ARIA States and Properties
• Dependency-free
• ES2015/AMD/Node module support

Getting aria-collapsible

You've got a couple options for adding aria-collapsible to your project:

• Download a tagged version from GitHub and do it yourself (old school).
• Install using npm: npm install aria-collapsible --save
• Install using Yarn: yarn add aria-collapsible

Usage

HTML

To use aria-collapsible, your markup needs two elements: a control and a region. The control, typically a <button> or an <a> element, is what your user will interact with and is the element that controls the display of the collapsible region. The region is an element elsewhere on the page whose display is handled by the control.

The two elements are associated by adding an aria-controls="region" attribute to the control. The value of the aria-controls attribute corresponds to the value of the region's id attribute.

<button type="button" aria-controls="region" aria-expanded="true" aria-hidden id="control">Menu</button>

<nav id="region">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="#">Chapter 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Chapter 2</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Chapter 3</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Chapter 4</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Chapter 5</a></li>
  </ul>
</nav>

CSS

Most browsers don't natively hide elements with the aria-hidden attribute so you'll need to add the following to your stylesheet:

[aria-hidden] {
  display: none !important;
}

JavaScript

Lastly, initialize aria-collapsible by creating a new Collapsible, passing in a DOM reference to the control, and calling the setup() method.

const collapsible = new Collapsible(document.querySelector('#control'));

collapsible.setup();

You can see the above in action in the included example file.

Collapsible regions can be shown and hidden programatically using the toggle() method:

collapsible.toggle();

You can also teardown a collapsible region, resetting the DOM to its initial state and removing event handlers:

collapsible.teardown();

Browser Support

aria-collapsible works in modern browsers. The library makes use of several new(ish) JavaScript features, including:

• Arrow function expressions (MDN)
• Classes (MDN)
• Private class fields (MDN)

aria-collapsible, in an effort to remain as lightweight and dependency-free as possible, leaves it up to you to choose whether or not to polyfill features for older browsers.

Acknowledgments

aria-collapsible is inspired by the following works:

• Steve Faulkner's article, HTML5 Accessibility Chops: hidden and aria-hidden
• Heydon Pickering's Progressive collapsibles demo
• Nicolas Hoffman's jQuery collapsible regions plugin

Special thanks to Jeremy Fields for his help testing with VoiceOver.

aria-collapsible is written and maintained by Jason Garber with the help of some great contributors.

License

aria-collapsible is freely available under The MIT License. Go forth and make the Web a more accessible place.