Telerik blogs
The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, culture, location, or physical or mental ability. When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability.

W3C Accessibility Basics

This is how the World Wide Web Consortium Accessibility Basics article starts. To help make the web more accessible, W3C maintains the WAI-ARIA specification. In a world of ever advancing web technologies, the number of RIA (Rich Internet Application) offerings increase every day. HTML, Javascript and CSS is used to create UI experiences that go far beyond HTMLs inherently document-oriented nature. WAI-ARIA tries to fill in the semantic gap between HTML as a language that describes content and the increasingly control-oriented tools and widgets it is used for. The justification is obvious - accessibility tools and assistive technologies understand HTML, but HTML's semantic structures by themselves are not enough to describe complex visual entities and specific functionality associated with them.

To enhance the semantic power of HTML, WAI-ARIA defines a set of roles that correspond to various widgets on your page. These widgets are characterized by various states and properties. Roles, states and properties are implemented as attributes of elements in HTML. Web content authors are responsible for specifying semantically correct roles for various widgets, sections, menus, and other functionally rich parts of the page. Together with that, interactive content needs to be described through WAI-ARIA states and properties, so that assistive technlogies can identify and describe available operations and expected outcome to the user.

There is more to accessibility that can be said in a single blog post. A single blog post, however, will suffice to introduce you to the accessibility improvements we have introduced in RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, and more specificially, WAI-ARIA support. With the upcoming Q2 2011 beta release, 9 controls from the ASP.NET AJAX suite support WAI-ARIA: RadTreeView, RadGrid, RadEditor, RadTreeList, RadCalendar, RadInput, RadWindow, RadTooltip and the newly introduced RadNotification. They all share a common property - EnableAriaSupport.

Let's take RadGrid:

RadGrid for ASP.NET AJAX

Without WAI-ARIA support, the rendered markup would be like:

RadGrid markup no WAI-ARIA support

When we set EnableAriaSupport="true", RadGrid renders the following markup:

RadGrid with enabled WAI-ARIA support

Note how the grid markup is decorated with role and aria-[state] attributes. These describe the functional parts of the grid to assistive technologies. Additionally, a grid may not stay in the form it has been originally rendered. When you enable selection, for example, RadGrid updates the selected state of rows with the aria-selected attribute:

RadGrid selected row with WAI-ARIA support

Similarly, when grouping is used, group headers get the role="rowgroup" attribute and depending on whether they are expanded or not, the aria-expanded attribute is set:

RadGrid group header row with WAI-ARIA support

Similarly to RadGrid, we have taken the care to thoroughly describe the semantics of all WAI-ARIA-enabled components. If you want to find out more about this feature, wait for the Q2 2011 beta release (expected by the end of the week) and give it a try yourself. Let us know how this can be of use in your accessible projects, and definitely share an opinion if you believe more can be added or we can further improve something.


About the Author

Veli Pehlivanov

is a Technical Lead at one of Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX teams, where he primarily works on RadGrid and a few other data- and input-centric controls, including RadListView, RadCalendar and RadInput. Veli's interests lie in the area of web development, C#, .NET, JavaScript and agile project management. He likes being on the cutting edge of technology and is keen on delivering efficient software and a greater value for the user.

Related Posts

Comments

Comments are disabled in preview mode.