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
JavaScript module (ESM), CommonJS, and browser global (window.Collapsible) support

Getting aria-collapsible

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

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

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 aria-controls="region" aria-expanded="true" id="control" hidden>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>

JavaScript

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 tear down 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 and, 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
Adrian Roselli's article, Disclosure Widgets

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.