ARIA
In one sentence
Attributes that describe roles, states and labels to assistive technology when HTML alone cannot.
Analogy Mental model
A spoken guide for someone who cannot see the room: this is the main menu, this is the search box, type your terms here.
In practice What you actually do
Use it to fill gaps, not to rebuild what HTML already provides. A div that must act as a button needs a role, a tabindex and key handling, at which point a real button element was the simpler answer.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Wrong ARIA is worse than none, because it overrides the semantics assistive technology would otherwise infer correctly. The first rule of ARIA is not to use ARIA when the element already exists.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →