WAI-ARIA: aria-dropeffect (Property)

Description
[Deprecated in ARIA 1.1]
In ARIA 1.1 the drag and drop attributes aria-grabbed and aria-dropeffect were slated to be deprecated.
The idea was to use native accessibility API features for drag and drop instead. However, in practice, since the accessibility API features for accessible drag and drop still don’t exist and likely won’t for several years, these attributes will continue to be supported on the Windows OS and reflected in the accessibility tree for some years to come until these APIs become available for use in development.
As such, the prior ARIA 1.0 guidance for making drag and drop accessible still remains valid at this time.
Indicates what functions can be performed when a dragged object is released on the drop target.
Note: The aria-dropeffect property is expected to be replaced by a new feature in a future version of WAI-ARIA. Authors are therefore advised to treat aria-dropeffect as deprecated.
This property allows assistive technologies to convey the possible drag options available to users, including whether a pop-up menu of choices is provided by the application. Typically, drop effect functions can only be provided once an object has been grabbed for a drag operation as the drop effect functions available are dependent on the object being dragged.
More than one drop effect may be supported for a given element. Therefore, the value of this attribute is a space-delimited set of tokens indicating the possible effects, or none if there is no supported operation. In addition to setting the aria-dropeffect attribute, authors SHOULD show a visual indication of potential drop targets.
aria-dropeffect Example
None
Characteristics
Used in Roles
- All elements of the base markup
Value
- token list
- A list of one or more tokens.
- copy
- A duplicate of the source object will be dropped into the target.
- execute
- A function supported by the drop target is executed, using the drag source as an input.
- link
- A reference or shortcut to the dragged object will be created in the target object.
- move
- The source object will be removed from its current location and dropped into the target.
- none (default)
- No operation can be performed; effectively cancels the drag operation if an attempt is made to drop on this object. Ignored if combined with any other token value. e.g., ‘none copy’ is equivalent to a ‘copy’ value.
- popup
- There is a popup menu or dialog that allows the user to choose one of the drag operations (copy, move, link, execute) and any other drag functionality, such as cancel.
Semantic HTML
No HTML element equivalent.
Reference
- WAI-ARIA 1.2 Specification
Refer to the notes from the WAI-ARIA 1.2 specification for more information on aria-dropeffect.