Does WAI-ARIA significantly increase the expense of development and the amount of widget code?
No, in fact ARIA enabled widgets can be significantly easier and less costly to implement in a browser than other widgets. Here’s why: ARIA techniques line up quite nicely with how most accessibility interfaces already work. ARIA simply adds a description of the role and properties – descriptions that provide information to assistive technologies. Also, ARIA requires only that code be added to the module that implements accessibility, not to the core browser. It is the accessibility module that then passes information about role, state, and changes in state through already supported interfaces.
