WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Intro to Advanced Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: May 11, 2017 6:28AM

There are actually quite a few reasons why people end up using ARIA.

Primarily, styling the native HTML element can be very difficult,
especially buttons, and designers design the UI without considering
the underlying HtML, they think about the looks, leave the
implementation to the developer.
People use pre packaged libraries and such, that often get it wrong. I
can´t remember if it is Ract or Angular, I think React, that ditches
all HtML in favor of divs and spans with Javascript frosting and CSS
sprinkles (I admit I am bad at my libraries, I know JQuery and
Bootstrap fairly well but my knowledge outside of that is pretty
uncharted, safe a presentation or an article here and there). For that
we need ARIA to provide accessibility.
And if the proper ARIA roles and states are provided and Javascript
provides the expected interaction, there is no reason why an ARIA
widget shouldn't be as accessible as an HTML element, that is the
whole point of ARIA. IN reality, we're not there yet, but we should
get there.



On 5/11/17, JP Jamous < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Although I am a strong believer in good solid HTML and only the use of ARIA
> as icing on the cake, I don't want to cut Joseph's head off if he wrote his
> document the way he did. Maybe there is a good reason why he did it that way
> based on his internal environment.
>
> ARIA heavy pages tend to act like gas next to a fire. Once AT gets in
> contact with ARIA heavy apps, the results are not always good. In fact, it
> can cause the AT, such as JAWS, to crash. I have witnessed this on many
> sites. That's the only thing I would warn you to keep in mind Joseph.
>
>
>