HTML5/HTML 5 and WAI-ARIA

[Albert Wiersch]

I see that HTML5 is suppose to support WAI-ARIA:
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/

Here's the HTML5 reference to it (BIG PAGE!):
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.h ... ducts-aria

Before seeing this in the specs, I don't believe I've ever heard of it or had anyone mention or email me about it. I am wondering if anyone here uses this?

[MikeGale]

I don't use it (currently).

I faintly remember looking at it. If I'm not mistaken it means additional markup. I'm not sure how many user agents implement it yet, or more importantly how much. If some did it would, I guess be required (at some time) by goverment type work, and specialised applications. It looked like a lot of work following a cursory evaluation.

NOTE: I decided to get a bit more insight and found this link http://j.mp/CqISE. It mentions some special UA's and notes that Opera 9.5, Firefox, Safari and IE8 have some sort of implementation. (The implementation might be very small, I haven't tried to check.) If a developer has to pay for a UA that's not going to speed adoption.

[Albert Wiersch]

Thanks Mike. I'll watch and see if it catches on and becomes worthwhile to implement in CSE HTML Validator. It doesn't look like it would be too difficult to support the extra attributes but my plate is full right now with WCAG 2.0, CSS3, and HTML5.