

Jesse Hausler (Principal Accessibility Specialist at Salesforce) covers this his article article, ‘ 4 Major Patterns for Accessible Drag and Drop‘. A good place to start exploring is ARIA Live Regions, which help you communicate operation, identity, and state during a drag and drop interaction. Without prior knowledge, this area can sound like something daunting to implement.

It is about enriching and enlivening real world objects in the context of our human physiology. It is about facilitating non-traditional device interaction without sacrificing usability. Modern skeuomorphism is the bridge at the intersection of digital and industrial design. Whilst there may not be an obvious real-world counterpart to dragging digital cards around an interactive Kanban list, such as that of Trello, the action itself is familiar to humans, so it’s easy to learn. Skeuomorphism is where an object in software mimics its real world counterpart.

This bit of skeuomorphism makes UIs with drag and drop interactions intuitive to use. Drag and drop, in the context of a web app, gives people a visual way to pick up and move elements just like we would in the real world.
