ARIA All The Things

Colleagues,

 

"...thinking it will progress like DPub, namely it's coga- but there may be things we want to pull into core ARIA." (IRC aside comment)

 

After following along on the #ARIA IRC channel Tuesday afternoon at TPAC, I am having grave concerns that we are looking to ARIA All The Things – that somehow moving all of our accessibility solutions into some kind of ARIA-world, separate but somehow equal, is how we can solve accessibility issues.

 

ARIA – Accessible Rich Internet Applications – was developed to convey document/application structure, and to provide a means of mapping GUI interactions to the Accessibility APIs so that Assistive Technology could work with “DHTML”. It was not, as I understand it, created to be the magic talisman that would expand to solve all accessibility issues moving forward.

 

I fear that we’re losing our way here – that we’re getting to a point that rather than looking to improve and expand on existing mainstream web technologies, we’re instead building out our own little ghetto. It’s almost like we’re forgetting our own educational message that a) accessibility is not a black or white condition, that rather it is a million shades of gray, and that b) due to aging and other related issues we are all temporarily “abled” and that we will all likely need some form of accommodation or assistance at some point or other. We need to be focused on mainstreaming our design principles, not keeping them in a special “disabled-only” box.

 

My question to you all is this: am I wrong in thinking how I am thinking? Is moving all of our accessibility solutions into a “one-stop shop” (aka ARIA-World) the right way forward? Or do we instead look to get as much of our concerns addressed using mainstream technology and robust education, so that developers don’t have to do extra “ARIA work”? That we’ve worked with other specs and WG’s inside of W3C to ensure all of our web technologies are accessibility aware, accessibility friendly, and useful and usable by all content creators, not just those schooled in the Art of ARIA?

 

I suspect my thoughts and opinions here are pretty obvious, but I don’t claim to have “The Answer”, and I am curious to hear other’s thoughts here. I think we need to have this discussion, and relatively soon. 

 

Thanks for your feedback.

 

JF

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John Foliot

Principal Accessibility Strategist

Deque Systems Inc.

 <mailto:john.foliot@deque.com> john.foliot@deque.com

 

Advancing the mission of digital accessibility and inclusion