WAI-ARIA Introduction: Making Advanced Websites and Web Applications Accessible

This presentation introduces WAI-ARIA for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. WAI-ARIA defines a way to make websites and web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. With WAI-ARIA, developers can make advanced web applications accessible and usable to people with disabilities. Currently certain functionality used in web applications is not available to some users with disabilities, especially people who rely on screen readers and people who cannot use a mouse. WAI-ARIA addresses these accessibility challenges, for example, by defining new ways for functionality to be provided to assistive technology. More specifically, WAI-ARIA provides a framework for identifying user interaction features, how they relate to each other, and their current state. For example, with WAI-ARIA, developers can identify menus, navigat ion, primary content, and other regions of pages, and thus enable keyboard users to easily move among regions, rather than having to press Tab many times. This session describes the problems that WAI-ARIA addresses, and introduces how WAI-ARIA solves them. We'll also clearly demonstrate the more simple aspects of WAI-ARIA that apply even to basic websites.