ARIA – More Than Just a Pretty Tune

A few years ago, it seemed most of the new technology buzzwords were music to the web accessibility guru’s ears. Words like standards and XHTML compliance helped developers compose more accessible Web sites.

But what about this new generation: Web 2.0, AJAX, RIA? Well, to the web accessibility specialist, it’s like seventeen car alarms going off at once. With so many moving parts, how can screen readers and other assistive technologies keep up to ensure a user-friendly experience to those with disabilities?

Well, let the music play, because now we have ARIA.

ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is not a programming language, but a kind of framework/guideline. Developers code their applications using these guidelines and most modern browsers and assistive technologies interpret them.*

You develop an ARIA-friendly application by adding a standard collection of roles, states, and properties to your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Assistive technologies understand ARIA markup and can react accordingly. So to create a dynamic tree menu, you make your container div have a role of “tree”, a folder item underneath it have a role of “group”, and each item underneath that have a role of “treeitem”. Here’s an example.

Now, in ARIA, the developer can identify content that changes as a “live region.”  The programmer can give directives on what should happen when this live region is updated. Live regions can be identified with a state of off, polite, assertive, or rude (my new semantic favorite). These parameters tell the assistive technology what to do if the content in the live region changes (with off meaning do nothing, rude meaning stop everything the user is doing and bring them back to this live region). Each assistive technology can cope in different ways. For example, a screen reader may make a “ding” if a live region changes and it is set to “polite”.

With all this great news, it is still important to remember that ARIA is not a replacement for good usability and design. And it doesn’t magically make your applications accessible. If you have dark gray text on a black background, no amount or role-coding will save you from the Accessibility police.

Here are some starter resources for ARIA:

• WAI-ARIA – The working group which gave us ARIA.
• ARIA techniques – From WebAIM
• JuicyStudio - A great blog for information on how to use ARIA.

*Unfortunately, one of those browsers that does not yet support ARIA is a biggie: Internet Explorer does not yet support Aria. But it will with the release if Internet Explorer 8. This does not mean you can’t use ARIA at all. You’ll just have to think of some alternatives for visual items in IE. Back to article

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