WAI-ARIA: the specifics

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In last month’s column, I provided an overview on WAI-ARIA, and how it provides developers with the ability to communicate more effectively with the assistive technology that people with disabilities use to view online information. This month we’ll look at what WAI-ARIA can do to address accessibility issues.

A good example of the power of WAI-ARIA is the ability to guide a screen reader to access particular content on a web page in a particular way. Before WAI-ARIA, this could only be achieved by flagging user-side requests such as ‘skip to content’ links. WAI-ARIA gives more control to developers by specifying specific parts of the document including ‘banner’, ‘navigation’, ‘main’, ‘search’ and ‘article’. These labels remove the need for users to guess which section may have the relevant information, significantly speeding up website navigation.

That’s great for static content, but what about dynamic? Also, how does a person using a screen reader know how important the update is? WAI-ARIA addresses this by providing an ‘aria-live’ element which can have values relating to its importance, such as ‘polite’ and ‘rude’. This means that a person with a screen reader can be alerted to the update subtly, or have their attention instantly drawn to the content, or somewhere in between depending on how the developer sets the status.  

WAI-ARIA also has a number of commands for flagging validation in forms. If an error happens while a form is being filled out, the error often appears on the screen when a user doesn’t pick it up. WAI-ARIA also provides commands for alerting the user to this information to ensure that a form is filled out correctly.

Although WAI-ARIA is still evolving and relatively new, I strongly recommend that developers start using it. Unlike HTML 5, the code is not as dependent on the browser, but rather how assistive technology detects and makes use of the commands. Developers can start using these techniques today and greatly improve the accessibility of web pages for people with disabilities. There are many great resources online related to WAI-ARIA content, and one of the best is WebAIM’s WAI-ARIA FAQ and coding examples

In other W3C news, for those who have been asking about exactly what components and technologies need to be considered for online accessibility, the W3C has released an excellent overview document entitled the Essential Components of Web Accessibility, focusing on the role of accessibility in content, web browsers, authoring tools, evaluation tools and developer work.


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