Aria felt familiar and the more I learned about accessibility – the more I wanted to remember. And all it took was a simple online search and then I remembered;
An aria is a formal musical composition – self-contained piece for one voice, with or without instrumental or orchestral accompaniment, normally part of a larger work.
definition of Aria from Wikipedia.
Well this was it. I knew it.
So there is a few common points here although accessibility and opera (in musical terms) seems to be totally separated sections; ARIA in accessibility is often also used in a self-contained elements and components, and it is almost always a part of a larger work.
I do not know the reasons for the abbreviation of Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA), as it could also be named differently and I can only speculate that somebody liked opera music enough to propose this acronym for this “suite” as it is defined.
But one thing is very clear – if you do not know all the details, if you are unsure about the patterns that you must respect, if you are not familiar with support and most importantly – if you can use a native, semantic, element – then please do use native HTML elements instead of writing something that can potentially “destroy the beauty of entire opera” if I may be allowed to paraphrase the webpage or application as a musical art-piece.
Inspired by very useful YouTube video from Google Chrome Developers, Una Kravets – the developer advocate to be precise – but I had to add this as a warning to somebody that would be tempted to over-engineer accessibility;