WAI ARIA

Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements and can be used to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content and applications. Accessibility of web content requires semantic information about widgets, structures, and behaviours, in order to allow assistive technologies to convey appropriate information to persons with disabilities. These semantics are designed to allow an author to properly convey user interface behaviours and structural information to assistive technologies in document-level markup.

WAI-ARIA provides Web authors with the following: Roles to describe the type of widget presented, such as “menu”, “treeitem”, “slider”, and “progressbar” Roles to describe the structure of the Web page, such as headings, and regions Properties to describe the state widgets are in, such as “checked” for a check box, or “readonly” for most form controls Properties to define live regions of a page that are likely to get updates (such as stock quotes) A way to provide keyboard navigation for the Web objects and events, such as those mentioned above