Keyboard navigation refers to an alternative means of interacting with an application without using a mouse. In particular, it involves interaction with elements of the graphical user interface (GUI), such as menus and buttons. In JViews Charts, you can use keystrokes to move through the contents.

A JViews Charts application consists essentially of Swing GUI components and IlvChart components.

Keyboard navigation for Swing components is provided with the JDK. Some Swing elements interpret the Tab key specifically or act as a pseudo-focus cycle root, for example multiline text fields, JTrees, and JTables. For these components, you must use Ctrl+Tab to navigate out of the component. You can use Tab and Ctrl+Tab to navigate through all elements of the GUI. Use Enter, Esc, and the Arrow keys to operate menus, combination boxes, and buttons. You can assign shortcut keys to the most important menus and buttons by using JMenuItem.setAccelerator(KeyStroke) and AbstractButton.setMnemonic(int).

You can implement navigation on the elements of a chart area through the IlvChartCycleSelectInteractor.

This interactor can be instantiated in two modes.

You can implement operations on the elements of a chart area by creating an instance of IlvChartInteractor that overrides the processKeyEvent method. This interactor can access the currently selected element of the chart area from an instance of IlvChartAreaSelectionManager.

You can find a sample that illustrates the accessibility features of JViews Charts in <installdir>/jviews-chartsxx/samples/accessibility.