What is ARIA and how does it allow for accessible JavaScript widgets?
Accessibility should not hold web authors back from innovating. Several basic Javascript widgets are well-known and commonly used and yet conspicuously missing from HTML 4 today. Accessibility need not lag behind such innovations. The problem is not that JavaScript is bad for accessibility, as some have claimed, but that there is no mechanism to describe what the script is visually portraying to a user. ARIA seeks to make accessibility possible for such JavaScript widgets. ARIA provides authors with the following: • roles which describe what type of widget an element is portraying, such as “menu”, “treeitem”, “sliders” or “progressmeter” — elements which do not exist in HTML 4.01 but which authors really need for web applications. • roles that can describe the structure of a web page • properties which describe the state widgets are in, such as valuenow=”50%”, required=”true”, expanded=”true” etc. • properties which define live regions of a page that are likely to get updates (such as
