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Re: WAI ARIA - recommendations?

for

From: Dylan Barrell
Date: Apr 12, 2011 12:27PM

I agree with Jared, there are a lot of ways that WAI-ARIA can be used
to enhance existing HTML to make it easier to use in an additive way.

A good example is aria-live. It can be used to do things that cannot
be done with any other technique.

Examples:

1) Announcing search suggestions
2) Politely announcing changes to a marquee

Without these, the content can still be accessible (e.g. the marquee
can have all its elements keyboard focusable, even when not visible)
but with them, the content is much more usable (at least when used in
the right way, if used in the wrong way they can be irritating too).

You can also start using things like role="presentation" on your
layout tables and then the AT no longer has to try to guess at what
type of table it is. If the AT does not support this yet, then the
role will be ignored. Same for purely presentational images.

It would be nice to try to catalogue all the additive ARIA uses...

--Dylan