Internet Explorer 8.0 and Accessibility

I'm a strong believer in creating accessible applications... not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because I believe that it results in interfaces that are more obvious.

While studying the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit, I learned about IE8's partial support for the W3C's Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) standard. This standard will help to make dynamic web applications and custom user experiences more accessible.  This has always been a concern to me as I watch Web 2.0 applications become the norm.

IE8 will support the "role", "state", and "property" attributes from the ARIA standard.

To learn more about ARIA, read the W3C's ARIA Support white paper from Microsoft.

Additional resources are available on the W3C web site:

• ARIA Introduction provides background on the accessibility problem space solved with ARIA.
• ARIA Roles, States and Properties defines the ARIA syntax.
• ARIA Best Practices describes how you can develop accessible rich web applications using ARIA.