WAI-ARIA

WAI -ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications ) is an initiative to improve web sites and web applications to make them more accessible for people with disabilities, especially for blind users who use screen readers.

ARIA is a technical specification in the design stage. It is developed by members of the Web Accessibility Initiative, and is a recommended web standard of the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C) to be.

Concept and operation

ARIA uses the JavaScript and Ajax techniques. ARIA is a purely semantic extension for HTML, which does not change the layout of web pages. The accessibility of dynamic pages such as the Web 2.0, with its rich Internet applications and the overall user experience can be improved.

ARIA allows websites (or parts of a page ) to describe themselves as applications rather than static pages. For this purpose in dynamic web applications information is added to roles, characteristics and conditions. ARIA is intended for use by developers of Web applications, browsers, assistive technologies and programs for verification of accessibility.

The four pillars of WAI-ARIA:

Implementation in browsers

In Firefox 3 from Mozilla the upcoming accessibility standard has already been implemented, while working in Opera and serving as a basis for the Safari browser WebKit it. Microsoft strives to upgrade the version 8 of Internet Explorer with it. Non -ARIA -enabled browsers such as IE7 ignore the semantic extensions completely and will not be affected in their functionality.

ARIA is not validated with standard XHTML 1.0 validators at the moment. The W3C knows about it and is looking to post an acceptable solution for all parties. The development team of WordPress has consciously decided to forego the XHTML 1.0 validation and instead continue to progress.

ARIA has already been implemented in version 1.0 of Dojo Toolkit. In jQuery, and the Yahoo! UI Toolkit is working on it. In Gmail you have begun to integrate ARIA in the English-language user interface.

26536
de