@blockly/keyboard-navigation

This plugin for Blockly enables keyboard navigation. It includes different actions that might help visually impaired and motor impaired people navigate a Blockly workspace.

Keyboard navigation and screenreader support are closely coupled. The Blockly team intends to add screenreader support incrementally in Q3 of 2025, as we validate the general approach to navigation.

For more planning and timeline information please see our accessibility site.

End-user instructions

You can explore the current state of the plugin on the test page.

To use keyboard navigation, click on the workspace or press tab until you reach the workspace.

Once browser focus is on the Blockly workspace, you can use arrow keys to move a cursor around the workspace. You can use keyboard shortcuts to take actions at the cursor.

For instance, you can move the cursor to a dropdown field and press the Enter key to edit the field.

The available actions depend on the cursor location. For instance, if the cursor is on a block you can copy it with Ctrl + C.

You can open the toolbox by pressing T or pressing Tab until the toolbox is highlighted. Just like the workspace, you can use the arrow keys to move around the toolbox and select a block. Pressing Enter will place the block at the cursor's location on the workspace.

If you don't know which actions are available, you can press / to see a list of actions.

Giving feedback

If you use the test page and find a bug, please let us know by opening an issue on this repository! Include information about how to reproduce the bug, what the bad behaviour was, and what you expected it to do. The Blockly team will triage the bug and add it to the roadmap.

Using in your app

Installation

Using this plugin requires using at least Blockly v12.2.0. You can find the current minimum required version of Blockly in the peerDependencies section of the package.json file for the plugin.

Yarn

yarn add @blockly/keyboard-navigation

npm

npm install @blockly/keyboard-navigation --save

Usage

import * as Blockly from 'blockly';
import {KeyboardNavigation} from '@blockly/keyboard-navigation';

// Register styles. Only do this once per page-load.
// Must be done before calling Blockly.inject.
KeyboardNavigation.registerKeyboardNavigationStyles();

// Register the default toolbox. Only do this once per page-load.
// Must be done before calling Blockly.inject.
// See instructions below if you don't use the default toolbox.
KeyboardNavigation.registerNavigationDeferringToolbox();

// Inject Blockly.
const workspace = Blockly.inject('blocklyDiv', {
  toolbox: toolboxCategories,
});
// Initialize plugin.
const keyboardNav = new KeyboardNavigation(workspace);

Add shortcuts to page

In order to see the keyboard help popup when the user presses /, you need to add an empty div element to the hosting page that has the Blockly div element with the id "shortcuts". The plugin will take care of layout and formatting.

...
<div id="shortcuts"></div>
...
<div id="blockly"></div>
...

Use with custom Toolbox implementation

If you supply your own subclass of Toolbox, you need to override the onKeyDown_ method to make it a no-op. The base class has its own keyboard navigation built-in that you need to disable.

class YourCustomToolbox extends Blockly.Toolbox {
  protected override onKeyDown_(e: KeyboardEvent) {
    // No-op, prevent keyboard handling by superclass in order to defer to
    // global keyboard navigation.
  }
}

Use with cross-tab-copy-paste plugin

This plugin adds context menu items for copying & pasting. It also adds feedback to copying & pasting as toasts that are shown to the user upon successful copy or cut. It is compatible with the @blockly/plugin-cross-tab-copy-paste by following these steps:

import * as Blockly from 'blockly';
import {KeyboardNavigation} from '@blockly/keyboard-navigation';
import {CrossTabCopyPaste} from '@blockly/plugin-cross-tab-copy-paste';

// Register styles. Only do this once per page-load.
// Must be done before calling Blockly.inject.
KeyboardNavigation.registerKeyboardNavigationStyles();

// Inject Blockly.
const workspace = Blockly.inject('blocklyDiv', {
  toolbox: toolboxCategories,
});

// Initialize cross-tab-copy-paste
// Must be done before keyboard-navigation
const crossTabOptions = {
  // Don't use the context menu options from the ctcp plugin,
  // because the keyboard-navigation plugin provides its own.
  contextMenu: false,
  shortcut: true,
};
const plugin = new CrossTabCopyPaste();
plugin.init(crossTabOptions, () => {
  console.log('Use this error callback to handle TypeError while pasting');
});

// Initialize keyboard-navigation.
// You must pass the `allowCrossWorkspacePaste` option in order for paste
// to appear correctly enabled/disabled in the context menu.
const keyboardNav = new KeyboardNavigation(workspace, {
  allowCrossWorkspacePaste: true,
});

Contributing

To learn more about contributing to this project, see the contributing page.