Jquery and WAI ARIA

Question

I've been doing some research on web accessibility and I read that jquery doesn't have great support for WAI ARIA like dojo or YUI does. Is this true?

I'm still in the process of researching web accessibility so if anyone can recommend any good articles or jquery plugins for keyboard navigation or handling screen readers. It would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

jQuery does very few things ... but does it well, in a simple manner and cross-browser. There are no complex widgets, plugins or whatever that could be considered as RIA in the library itself. It provides the bricks to build them.

Complex widgets that can be used out of the box by webdevelopers and webdesigners are found in libraries like jQuery UI or jQuery Tools. These libraries with complex scripts like tab menus, slideshows, etc can be whether utterly inaccessible or manage ARIA role, states and properties without having to worry about it.
Scripts from http://hanshillen.github.com/jqtest/ are based on jQuery UI plugins that have been improved for keyboard and ARIA support and any accessibility problem that could exist in the original scripts.

• WAI-ARIA 1.0 Authoring Practices from W3C/WAI itself is aimed at front-end developers of plugins and widgets (in JS and with minimal efforts in any JS library).
• If you want to use or understand existing widgets, this presentation from WebAIM could prove useful: http://webaim.org/presentations/2011/ahg/ariahtml5/