Accessible Web Interactivity Today!

You can use ARIA to make your DHTML accessible today.

I'm still seeing discussion about old techniques for JavaScript accessibility without any reference to the new draft WAI-ARIA specification and best practices guide. I find this alarming, and I can only conclude we need to do a better job at getting the word out.

WAI-ARIA provides a way to give semantic meaning to the DOM nodes which make up your DHTML user interface. Add ARIA role, property and state information appropriately and your DHTML widgets become accessible to assistive technology such as screen readers, and your whizbang Web2.0 application can reach that many more people. It is just good business sense.

The main browsers and JavaScript toolkits are adding support for ARIA. Let's move forward!