Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) is a set of attributes that define ways to make web content and web applications (especially those developed with JavaScript) more accessible to people with disabilities using assistive technologies like screen readers. Depending on the application, using HTML alone is not enough and you will have to use ARIA in order to fill in the gaps. Unfortunately, ARIA is commonly misunderstood and therefore misused by developers – ultimately making the web more inaccessible than accessible.
In this first part of a 3-part series, I aim to combat this problem by first discussing the dangers of ARIA. Then, I will give you an introduction to the official ARIA standard, and review the 5 rules of ARIA.
Read the article.