Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) is a

technical specification A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard. There are different types of technical or engineering specificati ...

published by the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

(W3C) that specifies how to increase the accessibility of

web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...

s, in particular,

dynamic content A dynamic web page is a web page constructed at runtime (during software execution), as opposed to a ''static web page'', delivered as it is stored. A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application ...

, and

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

components developed with

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * Ajax (play), ''Ajax'' (play), by the an ...

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, and related technologies. In the 15 September 2008 working draft, SVG 1.2 Tiny added support for WAI-ARIA. On 20 March 2014, WAI-ARIA 1.0 became a completed W3C Recommendation. 14 December 2017 saw the release of WAI-ARIA 1.1.

The 5 Rules of ARIA

# Don’t use ARIA if you can achieve the same semantics with a native HTML element or attribute # Do not change the semantics of native HTML (unless you really have to) # All interactive ARIA controls must be usable with the keyboard. # Do not remove semantics or hide focusable elements (using role="presentation" or aria-hidden="true" on a focusable element) # Ensure all interactive elements have an accessible name (Accessibility API accessible name).

Scope

Web developers increasingly use client-side scripts to create user interface controls that cannot be created with HTML alone. They also use client-side scripts to update sections of a page without requesting a completely new page from a

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

. Such techniques on websites are called

rich Internet applications A Rich Internet Application (also known as a rich web application, RIA or installable Internet application) is a web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software. The concept is closely related to a single-page ...

. These user interface controls and content updates are often not accessible to users with

disabilities Disability is the experience of any condition that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities or have equitable access within a given society. Disabilities may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physica ...

, especially

screen reader A screen reader is a form of assistive technology (AT) that renders text and image content as speech or braille output. Screen readers are essential to blindness, blind people, and are useful to visually impaired people, Illiteracy, illiterate, ...

users and users who cannot use a

mouse A mouse (: mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus'' ...

or other

pointing device A pointing device is a human interface device that allows a User (computing)#End-user, user to input Three-dimensional space, spatial (i.e., continuous and multi-dimensional) data to a computer. Graphical user interfaces (GUI) and Computer- ...

. WAI-ARIA allows

s (or portions of pages) to declare themselves as

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

rather than as static documents, by adding role, property, and state information to dynamic web applications. ARIA is intended for use by developers of

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

s, assistive technologies, and accessibility evaluation tools. WAI-ARIA describes how to add

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

and other

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

to HTML content in order to make user interface controls and dynamic content more accessible. For example, with WAI-ARIA it is possible to identify a list of links as a navigation

menu In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to the customer. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose, often with prices shown – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-est ...

and to state whether it is expanded or collapsed. Although originally developed to address accessibility issues in HTML, the use of WAI-ARIA is not limited to HTML: in principle, it can also be used in other

markup languages A markup language is a text-encoding system which specifies the structure and formatting of a document and potentially the relationships among its parts. Markup can control the display of a document or enrich its content to facilitate automated p ...

such as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)..

Documents

The

Web Accessibility Initiative The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an effort to improve the accessibility of the World Wide Web for people with disabilities. People with disabilities encounter difficulties when using computers generally, ...

has published an overview of WAI-ARIA that introduces the subject and guides readers to the WAI-ARIA Suite documents: ; Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) Version 1.0 :This is primarily aimed at developers of

Web browsers A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scree ...

, assistive technologies, and other user agents, in addition to developers of other

technical specifications A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard. There are different types of technical or engineering specificati ...

, and developers of accessibility evaluation tools. The WAI-ARIA has been marked as completed on 20 March 2014 and is therefore a

W3C recommendation The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

. ; WAI-ARIA Overview : This is a technical introduction to WAI-ARIA. It describes the problems WAI-ARIA tries to address, the underlying concepts, the technical approach and business reasons for adopting WAI-ARIA. ; WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices :This document describes best practices for delivering rich Internet applications with WAI-ARIA: it discusses subjects such as general steps for building accessible widgets, keyboard navigation, relationships,

form Form is the shape, visual appearance, or configuration of an object. In a wider sense, the form is the way something happens. Form may also refer to: *Form (document), a document (printed or electronic) with spaces in which to write or enter dat ...

properties,

drag-and-drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to ...

support, alert and

dialog boxes In computing, a dialog box (also simply dialog) is a graphical control element in the form of a small window that communicates information to the user and prompts them for a response. Dialog boxes are classified as " modal" or "modeless", depe ...

, reusable component libraries, and testing. ; Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA Roadmap) : Much of the content of this document has been moved into other documents. The ARIA specifications editors have included Lisa Seeman, Rich Schwerdtfeger, James Craig, Michael Cooper, and Lisa Pappas.

References

External links

Web Accessibility Checking Tools by Gareth Slinn

Neurological UX for accessibility

ARIA developer portal
documentation, videos, and articles relating to ARIA (materials under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license) {{DEFAULTSORT:Wai-Aria Accessible information Ajax (programming) Web 2.0

The 5 Rules of ARIA

Scope

Documents

See also

References

External links