Accessibility is important for making sure your websites and apps can be used by everyone, including people with disabilities. ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a set of attributes that can help improve accessibility by enhancing how assistive technologies like screen readers can understand your content.
What is ARIA?
ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. It is a specification introduced by the W3C that defines a set of attributes you can add to HTML elements to provide additional semantic information for assistive technologies. For example, ARIA attributes may communicate role, state, or property information to help screen readers better convey what kind of element it is, and what it is currently doing.
Some common ARIA roles include:
- navigation
- banner
- main
- search
- alert
ARIA states can indicate if an element is checked, selected, invalid, and more. This helps screen readers communicate interactive statuses to users.
The accessibility tree
ARIA attributes help form what is called the “accessibility tree”. This is a conceptual representation that assistive technologies use to understand relationships and roles between elements on your page.
The accessibility tree separates content from presentation, conveying only the meaning and relationships needed for understanding. ARIA attributes are used to build this tree of understandable elements.
Why use ARIA?
Native HTML elements have built-in semantics that accessibility tools can already interpret. However, sometimes additional clarification is needed, or semantics required for complex UI patterns. This is where ARIA comes in handy.
For example, a <nav> element represents a navigation section. But if you have multiple <nav> elements, ARIA could specify which one is the main navigation with aria-label=”Main site navigation”.
ARIA allows us to make interactive elements like custom JavaScript widgets and complex UIs accessible that otherwise may be difficult for assistive technologies to understand.
