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 three 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 GridToolbarDensitySelector 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 and emits 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(s)
`ALT` + `C`	Copy the currently selected row(s) including headers
`CTRL` + Click on cell	Enable multi-selection
`CTRL` + Click on a selected row	Deselect the row
`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
`Shift` + Click on header	Enable multi-sorting
`Shift` + `Enter`	Enable multi-sorting when column header is focused

Key assignment conventions

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