ARIA

Three years ago we announced our work on the ARIA-AT program to develop an interoperability testing system for assistive technologies, starting with screen readers. Last year we completed a redesign of the ARIA Practices Giude (APG), which web developers use for guidance on making accessible websites and apps. We’ve been hard at work along the way to build a testing system and collect results on screen reader web rendering interoperability. Today we’re announcing that the first round of test results from ARIA-AT are available and embedded on the APG so web developers can read about screen reader support for various ARIA features.

HTML Accessibility API Mappings (HTML-AAM) defines how user agents map HTML [HTML] elements and attributes to platform accessibility application programming interfaces (APIs). It leverages and extends the Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.2 and the Accessible Name and Description Computation 1.1 for use with the HTML host language. Documenting these mappings promotes interoperable exposure of roles, states, properties, and events implemented by accessibility APIs and helps to ensure that this information appears in a manner consistent with author intent.

Using ARIA instead of HTML is generally fine for content, layout, structure, and other static bits of a page. A div role=”heading” aria-level=”1″ is the same as h1 as far users and accessibility APIs are concerned. It is unlikely a user will ever notice the difference unless you use both…

Type-Ahead, Autocomplete, Autosuggest — die Combobox hat viele Namen. Wir erläutern die barrierefreie Umsetzung fürs Web nach ARIA 1.2.

ARIA roles and attributes can make your website more accessible, if you know what you're doing.

A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

“Roles” that specify the purpose of UI elements are crucially important for accessibility compliance and users. Yet many e-commerce sites fail to get this right.

In this article, Kate Kalcevich explains when to use ARIA and how to use it properly so that you can use ARIA in a way that’s helpful to the many disabled people who use [assistive technology](https://makeitfable.com/glossary/?utm_source=Smashing+Magazine&utm_medium=sponsored+content&utm_campaign=Upskill&utm_term=Fable&utm_content=Sept2022) to navigate the Internet. Let’s dive in!

A complete guide to WAI-ARIA 1.1. The only WAI ARIA cheat sheet you would ever need

Now that we had a look at all the possible ARIA properties let's do the same for all of the...

Let’s talk about disabled buttons. Specifically, let’s get into why we use them and how we can do better than the traditional disabled attribute in HTML

If you have an interface where content is dynamically updated, and when the content is updated it does not receive focus, then you likely are going to need a...

Some attributes in ARIA are boolean(-like). These attributes may seem a lot like boolean attributes in HTML, but there are some important differences to be aware of.

I like to use invalid HTML and ARIA as a design constraint; a line I can’t step across. Sounds obvious, but in practice it’s not always that simple!

Der direkter Draht zum Screenreader: Wie dynamische Änderungen im HTML-DOM live an assistive Technologien kommunizieren werden können

On July 6 2021 the ARIA in HTML specification, that I co-edit along with Steve Faulkner and Patrick H. Lauke, became a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot...

ARIA authoring practices are patterns and examples that are a great starting point, but they shouldn't be used as is - let's discuss why.

In part one of this three-part blog series, Gerard Cohen covers an introduction to the official ARIA standard and reviews the 5 rules of ARIA.

Spoiler alert: tooltips, modals, tabs, carousels, and dropdown menus are some of the user interface components that require more than CSS. To ensure accessibility of your interface, JavaScript is a necessary addition to accomplish focus management, respond to keyboard events, and toggle ARIA attributes.

Rolle, Zustand und ein zugänglicher Name — wann ist HTML barrierefrei? Möglichkeiten und Grenzen barrierefreier Techniken, und wie ARIA dabei helfen kann.

A community-driven effort to make digital accessibility easier.

HTML has all sorts of built-in features that, when used correctly, are accessible, will localize, and which just work. For example, if I want a button, I use , and a screen reader will announce it as button. For users in other languages, they will hear whatever is their word…

Original photo by Kevin Hale (photo no longer on Flickr), text added. CC BY-SA 2.0. The pun in the title is that some people pronounce the a11y numeronym as “alley”. That makes the full title sound like uncanny valley, the concept of human-looking things seeming almost, but not quite, human…