Absolute Orange

Aria

Written on Tue, 11th May 2010
By Amy Varga

Two weeks ago I decided to present WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) to my colleagues in our weekly meet.

Since I had previously read about WAI-ARIA it didn't take long for me to understand the theory behind the ARIA specification. In summary:

ARIA forms part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) which succeeds WCAG 1.0 and which are both at working draft level with the W3C.

It has been developed to address the accessibility problem that occurs when rich interaction semantics are added outside of the markup. When this happens the markup no longer expresses the information needed to populate accessibility metadata which is then mapped by the browser to the platform accessibility APIs.

WAI-ARIA provides a framework for providing proper semantics to HTML elements that provide information about:

• the role of the element within the page and in relation to other elements - the ARIA specification provides an ontology of roles that can be attached to content
• the states and properties of elements which are used to declare important attributes of an element that affect and describe interaction. These are categorised as widget attributes, live region attributes, drag-and-drop attributes, relationship attributes

The target audience for WAI-ARIA includes user agents, assistive technology, authors who create content, authoring tools and conformance checkers. The relationship between the user agent, the accessibility API and the assistive technology is best illustrated below:

My next step was to implement WAI-ARIA and test it on my Mac accessibility software, Universal Access.

27th September 2010 : in the mean time I have learnt that ARIA is only supported by screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA, Windows Eyes and SAToGo.

What makes ARIA difficult to implement is:

• It is only partly supported by browsers and accessibility software making it difficult to know which bits to implement.
• It does not validate on standard DTD's
• It only has limited support in HTML5.0

Despite these hurdles I decided that perhaps before I tried to implement WAI-ARIA I should test some real live examples using the accessibility software on my Mac.

For obvious reasons, the first website I visited was the RNIB (Royal National Institute of the Blind). Whilst there are some obvious improvements in accessible navigation including the Web Item Rotor and Web Auto Spots, overall I could find no implementation of ARIA on their website.

I spent the next few hours trying to find real live examples or demonstrations of WAI-ARIA. I found a few websites which I have referenced below but to be honest either the examples didn't work i.e. they weren't supported by Safari or Universal Access, or I didn't quite grasp the concepts.

27th September 2010 : Since ARIA is only supported in JAWS, NVDA, Windows Eyes or SAToGo, I would have to test examples using these assistive technologies. In the mean time I found Accessible Culture who has taken the time to test various ARIA specifications on all supported screen readers. This is a very useful website.

In conclusion, the concept of WAI-ARIA is a good one however, it requires a considerable amount of effort to implement and to date has limited support. Furthermore at the time of writing there are very few examples of ARIA being implemented. For the time being I am going to put WAI-ARIA on hold, perhaps when the specification is more widely recommended by the W3C and HTML 5.0 is more widely implemented then I will come back to it.

27th September 2010 : I've changed my mind. Just like the HTML 5.0 specification despite being unfinished and incomplete there are certain aspects of ARIA e.g. landmark roles that can be successfully implemented, so why not start implementing these? In other words ARIA is work in progress requiring ongoing research to keep up to date.