ARIA Examples

Summary

The Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA Roadmap) addresses the accessibility of dynamic Web content for people with disabilities. The roadmap outlines the technologies to map controls, AJAX live regions, and events to accessibility APIs, including custom controls used for Rich Internet Applications. The roadmap also outlines new navigation techniques to mark common Web structures as menus, primary content, secondary content, banner information and other types of Web structures. These new technologies can be used to improve the accessibility and usability of Web resources by people with disabilities, without extensive modification to existing libraries of Web resources.
--from W3C ARIA Roadmap

iCITA Example ARIA Implementations

There are two version of each ARIA example in the set of iCITA implementations. One is designed for the current and emerging web technologies (INLINE examples) and the other for current and legacy technologies (CLASS examples).

Inline ARIA Examples

Examples work in browsers that support CSS attribute selectors, currently includes Firefox 1.5+, Internet Explorer 7.0

ARIA markup is inline with the source html code

Examples will not validate with current web markup validation tools

ARIA added through CLASS information

Scripting is used to add ARIA markup from information in the class attribute values, this allows pages to validate with current web markup validators

Examples use the class attribute value to update the graphical syling, making it compatible with older browsers that do not support CSS attribute selectors. An onload event executes javascript to query the class attributes for class attribute values related to ARIA markup.

References

• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) Version 1.0
• W3C ARIA Roadmap
• W3C WAI-ARIA Primer
• W3C WAI-ARIA Best Practices
• Mozilla Developer Center ARIA Page
• XHTML2 Role Specifications

Browser Implementation of ARIA

Firefox

ARIA: Accessible Rich Internet Applications support in Firefox

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 8 Beta Blog Announcement

Internet Explorer 8 Release Note

Opera

Changelog for Opera 9.5 Beta 1 for Windows

Assistive Technology Support for ARIA

1. Firevox
2. Window Eyes Screen Reader
3. JAWS Screen Reader

Wikis

• DHTML Style Guide Wiki
• W3C ARIA BestPractices Wiki

Articles

• Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA by Martin Kliehm

Blogs

• Rich Schwerdtfeger (Distinguished Engineer in the IBM Emerging Technologies Group)