@tournant/dropdown NPM

@tournant/dropdown

A flexible, accessible dropdown menu.

💁‍ Read Before Use

This component implements a dropdown menu using the ARIA menu role. It’s a a dropdown menu.

«Fine,» you might think, «I need to implement a nested navigation and need a dropdown.» If so, this component is not the right choice. Technically speaking, a menu is no navigation. I highly encourage reading Menu & Menu Buttons of Heydon Pickering’s Inclusive Components blog or Adrian Roselli’s post Don’t Use ARIA Menu Roles for Site Nav.

Installation

You can install the component using NPM or Yarn.

npm install @tournant/dropdown --save

If you use Yarn:

yarn add @tournant/dropdown

Once the component is installed you need to import it wherever you want to use it.

import TournantDropdown from '@tournant/dropdown'

Don’t forget to add it to the registered components (been there, done that):

components: {
  TournantDropdown,
  // ... all the other amazing components
}

API

This is just a quick overview. For an in-depth guide how to use the component check the section Usage below.

Props

yPosition: Default: bottom. Must be top or bottom. Controls vertical positioning.
xPosition: Default: left. Must be left or right. Controls horizontal positioning.
ariaLabel: Optional. Add the aria-label attribute on a button. Can be used if it not viable to put text inside of the button. For other options see the article Accessible Icon Buttons from Sara Soueidan.

Slots

button-text: Text inside of the button. If you just add an icon, ensure to give the button an accessible name. Either via the ariaLabel prop or one of the other techniques explained by Sara Soueidan.
items: Items of the menu. All elements in here must have a role of menuitem and a tabindex="-1".

Styles

The component exposes the following CSS classes for its parts:

Classname	Element
t-ui-dropdown	Root
t-ui-dropdown__toggle	The button to open/close the menu
t-ui-dropdown__menu	`div` containing the menu buttons

The component comes with some default styles, e.g. it is setting position: absolute on the menu container as well as z-index: 10.

Positioning

Depending on use the menu might have to appear in different places. This happens through the yPosition and xPosition props. Depending on the respective value, a modifier class is added. You can use these classes to apply more styling and adapt the positioning further.

The following table shows an overview of these:

Position	Modifier Class
left	-is-left
right	-is-right
bottom	-is-bottom
top	-is-top

Usage

Labeling the Toggle Button

Text can be added inside of the menu using the button-text slot:

<template v-slot:button-text>
	Options
</template>

If it isn’t possible to add a word inside of the button read the article Accessible Icon Buttons from Sara Soueidan. In it she describes multiple options to ensure that Icon Buttons are accessible. If you opt for using aria-label you can use the ariaLabel prop to add it to the element.

💁‍ Once the component is mounted, it will check some values to determine if the button has accessible text. It will warn you in the browser console if it couldn’t detect any.

Opening and Closing the Menu

The menu gets toggled between open and closed state by triggering a click event on the button. As it uses a button element, this can also happen via the ENTER or SPACE keys. Additionally, ↓ can be used.

To close the menu, the user can click outside of it, Tab↹ away or use the ESC key. While the menu button is focussed ↑ will close the menu, too.

Menu Items

Items inside of the menu can be added via the items slot.

<template v-slot:items>
	<button tabindex="-1" role="menuitem">Rename</button>
	<button tabindex="-1" role="menuitem">Delete</button>
</template>

Make sure to add role="menuitem" and tabindex="-1" to the items you add. The role helps assistive technology to make sense of the items and override any native role the elements might have. Since keyboard navigation inside of the menu happens with ↓ and ↑ the items need to be taken out of the focus order.