ARIA
- Kim Collins (Unlicensed)
HTML is, at its essence, a markup language and not a programming language. Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) provides a means to cover the gaps in semantic HTML. With ARIA, we can add roles, states, and properties to HTML content.
For example, an anchor element (e.g. <a href=“http://www.Toronto.ca”>) already has a role (it's a link), states (whether or not it's visited, active, hovered, and/or focused) and properties (e.g. the target or the href of the link), so generally we do not need to add ARIA to anchors. However, because there is no such thing as an HTML <tab> element, we need to use the ARIA Tabs design pattern to ensure the needed semantics and keyboard interactions are available to the nonvisual and/or keyboard user.
The purpose of this section is to provide some support information on ARIA. For detailed information, we strongly recommend reviewing the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1 document.