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Keyboard & accessibility

The builder is designed to be usable with a keyboard and with assistive technology. This page summarises the accessibility support that is built in.

Keyboard navigation

You can move through the interface with the keyboard:

  • Interactive controls are reachable with Tab / Shift+Tab and show a visible focus outline.
  • The custom drop-downs behave like native comboboxes — open with Enter/Space, move with the arrow keys, choose with Enter, and dismiss with Escape.
  • Choice options (radio buttons and check-boxes) are operable with the keyboard.
  • The per-item action controls (States, Show When, Expression, …) can be activated from the keyboard, not just the mouse.

Dialogs

Modal dialogs manage focus properly:

  • Focus is trapped inside an open dialog so Tab doesn't wander behind it.
  • Escape closes the dialog.
  • Focus returns to a sensible place when the dialog closes.
  • Ctrl+Z (or Cmd+Z) — undo the last change; Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z (Cmd+Shift+Z on Mac) — redo. The same Undo / Redo buttons are always visible in the toolbar and disable themselves when there's nothing to undo/redo. History covers both structural edits (add/delete/move/rename) and answer changes in the preview, up to 50 steps back.
  • Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F) — jump to the preview's search box (searches the visible form text, or the FHIR JSON when that view is active) instead of the browser's own page search.

Screen-reader support

The interface exposes semantic roles and labels so assistive technology can make sense of it:

  • Menus, comboboxes and the builder tree carry appropriate ARIA roles and labels.
  • Validation errors are announced (they use an alert role), and the form-status indicator updates through a live region, so a screen-reader user hears when the response becomes valid or invalid.

Honest scope

Accessibility is an ongoing effort rather than a certified conformance claim. The features above cover keyboard operation, focus management, and the main screen-reader affordances; if you hit an accessibility gap, it is a bug worth reporting.

Next: Settings.