Progressive Enhancement with ARIA

Designing and developing with accessibility in mind has numerous benefits: it makes your website usable by everyone, it makes your content inherently more search engine friendly, and it makes providing context-sensitive interfaces (e.g. mobile) even easier.

In this session, Aaron Gustafson will provide you with a quick refresher on progressive enhancement and show you where the Web Accessibility Initiative's Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) spec fits into it all. Throughout the talk, Aaron will provide numerous examples of how to weave ARIA into your projects and how to use ARIA, in concert with JavaScript, to dramatically enhance the usability of client-side widgets.

About Aaron Gustafson

After getting hooked on the web in 1996 and spending several years pushing pixels and bits for the likes of IBM and Konica Minolta, AARON GUSTAFSON founded Easy! Designs, LLC, a boutique web consultancy. Aaron is a member of The Web Standards Project (WaSP), serves as Technical Editor for A List Apart, is a contributing writer for Digital Web Magazine and MSDN, and has amassed a library of writing and editing credits in the print world, including AdvancED DOM Scripting (Friends of Ed, 2007) and Web Design in a Nutshell (3rd Edition, O'Reilly). In addition to

appearing at Rich Web Experience, Aaron is a regular on the web conference circuit and is frequently called upon to provide web standards and JavaScript training in both the public and private sector. He blogs at easy-reader.net.

Photo by Cindy Li.

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