First Rule of ARIA: Don't Use ARIA

As you expand your accessibility knowledge, you've probably heard the term ARIA a few times, maybe with an explanation, maybe not. Let's start there: ARIA (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA) is a standard from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (https://www.w3.org/) via the Web AccessibilityInitiative (WAI) (https://www.w3.org/WAI/).

- Ashleigh Lodge

ARIA is an acronym that stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, which is a bit of a mouthful, but it's important to understand what ARIA is for, and it's all right in the name. The first A is Accessible, which makes sense—we all want our work to be accessible. The last three letters in the acronym should be taken as a group, referring to Rich Internet Applications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_Application), which, as per Wikipedia, are "web application[s] that ha[ve] many of the characteristics of a desktop application… and may allow the user interactive features such as drag and drop, background menu, WYSIWYG editing, etc." Over the history of the internet, we've seen the web evolve from static sites, to simple applications in the browser, to the complex, distributed web applications we have now. First introduced in 2015, ARIA has always been meant for complex web applications, not simple pages or sites like blogs.