Getting started with ARIA¶

How to make your pages accessible to folks using assistive technologies?

Argh! No idea. The timeless advice was to use clean, semantic markup. But beyond that, it’s a bit of a mystery.

There’s something about ARIA roles that you can add to your markup:

<div role="button">Place Order</div>

But why wouldn’t you just use a button there? 🤔

Then: Argh! — A long spec doc… — you know how that goes.

But no more, apparently.

There’s a brand new ARIA Authoring Practices Guide, fledgling still but with patterns, practices, and other guides.

It has a (slightly hidden) Start here. The opening section:

No ARIA is better than Bad ARIA

This is what I need. A clear introduction. Progress. 📚

The WAI are @w3c_wai on Twitter, and have an RSS feed for the ever-web.