ARIA – the complex parts of opera music for accessibility

Note: This post is older than two years. It may still be totally valid, but things change and technology moves fast. Code based posts may be especially prone to changes...

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Inspired by a YouTube video from Una Kravets and always knowing that aria reminded me of something I had to elaborate on that (and explain a small bit on dangers of aria as well)

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;

Semantic markup – Designing in the Browser – Nice video from Una Kravets, Google Chrome Developer channel, developer advocate) .

Author: Bogdan Cerovac

I am IAAP certified Web Accessibility Specialist (from 2020) and was Google certified Mobile Web Specialist.

Work as digital agency co-owner web developer and accessibility lead.

Sole entrepreneur behind IDEA-lab Cerovac (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility lab) after work. Check out my Accessibility Services if you want me to help your with digital accessibility.

Also head of the expert council at Institute for Digital Accessibility A11Y.si (in Slovenian).

Living and working in Norway (🇳🇴), originally from Slovenia (🇸🇮), loves exploring the globe (🌐).

Nurturing the web from 1999, this blog from 2019.

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