Technology has brought convenience and luxury for many however it is a necessity for people with disabilities.
I am writing this largely with the personal experience over a period. I wanted to write on how the technology has made the positive impact on people with disabilities for many years. I would like to specifically focus on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) space in this article.
The assistive technologies such as screen readers and speech recognition applications rely on HTML semantics of the page to convey the information such as heading, button, link, etc. The assistive technologies such as screen readers also use these semantic information to provide options to the users to quickly navigate in an application with special quick navigation keys apart from tab and arrow keys.
ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a specification from W3C which enables to provide the semantic information to the assistive technologies in custom built applications. It is very important to use the ARIA in a right way else it will not convey the intended information to the users.
This post will discuss 10 (ten) and basic best practices of using ARIA attributes in an application. These best practices have been identified by analysing various ARIA related accessibility issues found in various custom elements.