What is ARIA and how does it enable accessible JavaScript widgets today?
ARIA enables accessibility in 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 stock quotes), as well as an interruption policy for those updates • properties describing drag sources and drop targets • a way to provide keyboard navigation for JavaScript widgets in HTML — this is basically the same as IE’s extensions to tabindex which have been around since IE 5, which means the technique works to make key navigable widgets in IE. In addition, these tabindex changes have been part of the HTML 5 specif
