Q&A: A Tangled Web of ARIA
taught by: Mark Steadman
Session Summary
Web development has seen an alarming trend of using ARIA-first development instead of using the power of Semantic HTML, which has led to components that are a complete tangled web of ARIA that is hard to unwind. In this session, will walk through a scenario of a development team creating a component from scratch, the different iterations of that component, and how using ARIA only can create the tangled web of difficult-to-read HTML code that is also inaccessible.
Description
Watch this presentation in the Knowbility Learning Center
In this day and age of web development is done using mostly JavaScript frameworks, semantic HTML has been left behind. In its place we see more developers using ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) to fill in the gaps and make their content accessible.
However, a scary trend that has been seen lately is that development teams have solely relied on ARIA for making content accessible. What is left is a giant mess of ARIA that is either incorrect, difficult to understand, or leaves developers wondering what they have to do to make it accessible again.
In this talk, we will walk through a scenario of a development team creating a component from scratch, the different iterations of that component, and how using ARIA only can create the tangled web of difficult-to-read HTML code that is also inaccessible.
(ICT 2022 Presenter)
Practical Skills
- Accessibility benefits of semantic HTML.
- The dangers of ARIA-first web development.
- How to create accessible coding standards.