Carbon Design System

Link

Stable
Last updated Sep 28, 2026
Carbon Core

    Links are used as navigational elements. They navigate users to another location, such as a different site, resource, or section within the same page.

    Link

    What Carbon provides

    Carbon bakes keyboard operation into its components, improving the experience of blind users and others who operate via the keyboard. Carbon incorporates many other accessibility considerations, some of which are described below.

    Keyboard interactions

    No annotations for keyboard interactions are needed. All links are in the tab order, and activated with standard keys. Where Carbon links are not persistently underlined, they receive an underline on focus.

    Links are reached by Tab key and activated with the Enter key

    Links are reached by Tab key and activated with the Enter key.

    Contrast

    Carbon's link text and visited link text colors meet the minimum contrast requirement of 4.5:1 with its background. Carbon also uses a link color and a visited link color that are both distinguishable from surrounding body text.

    Visited link text has sufficient contrast with both its background and surrounding body text

    Link text has sufficient contrast with both its background and surrounding body text.

    Annotate the connection between generic links and text that gives context

    Visited link text has sufficient contrast with both its background and surrounding body text.

    Design recommendations

    Ensure link context

    If your design uses generic link names such as "read more," consider making them unique. Otherwise, annotate a connection with other text in the design that provides context. This will allow developers to implement in a way that increases accessibility. See the Equal Access Toolkit link text topic.

    Annotate the connection between generic links and text that gives context

    Annotate the connection between generic links and text that gives context.

    Development considerations

    Keep these considerations in mind if you are modifying Carbon or creating a custom component.

    • Associate generic links such as "read more" with other contextual text, using either aria-describedby or aria-labelledby (to concatenate multiple text strings). See the Equal Access Toolkit guidance for more details.

    • See the ARIA authoring practices for more considerations.

    Accessibility testing status

    Latest version: 1.114.0 | Framework: React (@carbon/react)

    ComponentAccessibility testStatusLink to source code
    LinkTest(s) that ensure the initial render state of a component is accessible.Passes all automated tests with no reported accessibility violations.GitHub link
    Tests that ensure additional states of the component are accessible. This could be interactive states of a component or its multiple variants.Passes all automated tests with no reported accessibility violations.
    Tests that ensure focus is properly managed, and all interactive functions of a component have a proper keyboard-accessible equivalent.Test data is either not available or not applicable for this component state.
    This manual testing ensures that the visual information on the screen is properly conveyed and read correctly by screen readers such as JAWS, VoiceOver, and NVDA.A human has manually tested this component, e.g. screen reader testing.
    Learn more about tag and test meaningView all component accessibility status

    Feedback

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