- Edward

“let me know where the best places to go are to learn more, and people to talk to.”

For Accessible Ajax (and ARIA), Steve Faulkner and Gez Lemon of the Paciello Group have been doing some impressive work in demonstrating how to create accessible ajax applications.

In particular, in his Accessibility 2.0 presentation last week, Steve Faulkner took Twitter and fixed a large number of problems first with just plain old Ajax, and also demonstrated working solutions using ARIA. In effect, ARIA looked so easy in comparison to plain old Ajax.

First of all, thanks for your insightful reply! Let me pick on one particular point that I think needs a bit more clarification. You wrote:

Also, ARIA is a solution for the future, but there currently isn’t widespread support for ARIA, so for the present, we need to work with what we’ve got, which involves trying to get developers to work more responsibly, and trying to speed initiatives like ARIA along to the point where use can become more widespead.

I would like to point out that, nobody is losing anything by implementing ARIA today instead of waiting for more widespread adoption. It may be a while until IE 8 is out, for example. Yet the adoption of ARIA today will give those with capable browsers and screen readers the enhanced accessibility today. As more and more browsers and screen readers will be released that support ARIA, those will automatically start working better with the ARIA-enriched solutions. And older browsers and screen readers won’t notice a difference: ARIA is designed in a fashion that is unintrusive: If it’s there, and the client can use it, it will be used. Otherwise, it will be ignored.

The message to Ajax web developers has to be: Don’t wait until date x or release y have happened, but start adopting ARIA today. You won’t lose anything in the investment, on the contrary! It is an investment into the future if ARIA is being adopted today. Especially with new solutions, putting it in right at the start is much less of a problem than having to refit stuff later.

First, we deliberately made it rant-ish, to make people sit up and listen – yes, progress in innovation is essential, and we can’t stop Ajax, but then the article is not trying to say that (despite the title) – it is trying to make developers just sit up and think a little bit more responsibly about what they are doing. A lot of people in the centre of the web community are in tune with accessibility, but then again there are still a lot of people who are ignorant about it.

Also, ARIA is a solution for the future, but there currently isn’t widespread support for ARIA, so for the present, we need to work with what we’ve got, which involves trying to get developers to work more responsibly, and trying to speed initiatives like ARIA along to the point where use can become more widespead.

Also, Cake isn’t using accessibility as the sole argument to rant against a technology he doesn’t like – he has no problem with Ajax, but just feels that it is immature and should be used with more caution than we are currrently using it. He says this much.

To follow up on this article, I will soon be commissioning some authors to write some more articles exploring what can be done to use Ajax more responsibly, to make Ajax-driven applications more accessible in the here and now.

Best regards,

Chris Mills