Ajax Girl

Martin Kliehm has written up a nice overview of what is going on in the world of accessible Web 2.0 applications.

The article documents the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) work, primarily done by Becky Gibson, Aaron Leventhal, and Richard Schwerdtfeger.

One of the core problems is that anything can be an input of some time. What we see as a slider could just be <div class="slider"> and how would a screen reader know what to do there?

This is where roles come in:

Roles come in two flavors: XHTML and WAI‑ARIA. A basic set is defined in the XHTML 1.1 Role Attribute Module. It is extended by the WAI‑ARIA Role RDF taxonomy. WAI‑ARIA roles have the wairole prefix, like in role="wairole:slider".

Roles are further divided into widgets and structural roles. Widget roles include progressbar, slider, button, tree, textfield, checkbox, alert, and dialog. So if you want to use a fancy layer instead of a system dialog box, you can tell screen readers what it is by using role="dialog". More cool widget examples can be found at mozilla.org.

I have been playing more and more with the graceful failback side of Ajax, and how microformats can help out. It seems to be able adding semantics to our simple building box (CSS classes and such).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/accessible-web-20-applications-with-wai-aria