Dragging alternative

Success criterion 2.5.7, Dragging Movements, is one of the criteria WCAG 2.2 added, and it asks for one thing: any function that is operated by dragging must also be operable by a single pointer without dragging, unless the dragging is essential to what the function is. Sorting a kanban board by hauling cards between columns is the textbook failure, and the textbook fix is a move menu on each card that reaches exactly the same state with two taps. Reordering, resizing a pane, panning a map, and dropping a file into a drop zone are all in scope, and all of them have a tap-sized answer: a menu, a pair of arrow buttons, a file picker beside the zone.

The most common misreading is that keyboard access discharges the duty. It does not. The criterion names a single pointer, and it exists for people whose pointer is imprecise or expensive to hold steady: a tremor, a head-tracker, a mouth stick, someone dragging with one finger on a phone in a moving bus. A board that is fully operable from the keyboard, with a proper roving drag handle and arrow keys, still fails 2.5.7 for the mouse user who cannot reliably hold a button down across 200 pixels. Conversely a control operated by a single tap on a track, such as a slider that jumps to the point you click, satisfies it without any menu at all, because the drag was never the only route.

Essential is a narrow exception and worth reading narrowly. A signature pad is essential dragging: the path is the data. A drawing canvas is essential. Reordering a list is not, because the position is the data and the drag was only ever one way to state it. When in doubt, ask what the drag produces rather than what it feels like, and see whether that result can be named some other way.

The alternative also has to be findable, which is where most retrofits fall down. A move command buried behind a long press that nobody discovers is not an alternative anyone reaches, and a control small enough to miss reintroduces the problem it was meant to solve, so it owes target spacing as well. This criterion sits in a family with pointer cancellation and focus not obscured: each one takes an interaction that works perfectly for a steady hand and a settled screen and asks what it costs everyone else. Where the pointer itself is the barrier rather than the gesture, the reader is often on switch access, and a menu is the only thing on the board they can use at all.