Navigating through the website is a normal affair in the current time. A huge percentage of people (globally) have easy access to digital devices plus internet connections. As per Statista, almost 4.4 billion individuals are active users of the internet (as of April 2019).

For today’s retailers, setting up a website is no more a challenge, instead how can you grab customers’ attention towards your website is more important. Talking about different goals to achieve in digital retail, providing users with an engaging UX (user experience) is vital.

This article is intended to enhance WordPress site UX via improving its accessibility with the use of ARIA approach. Not every person is blessed with the ability to see. However, it doesn’t restrain them to interact with others.

Similarly, when we talk about the digital world the technological advancements have crushed the barriers for people with any kind of impairment.

For instance, the screen reader is a kind of assistive technology that helps people with visual impairment to interact with digital devices. Though it is specifically designed to help visually impaired people, it is beneficial for other people too like (illiterate, or any kind of learning disability).

To stay ahead of this approach, try to look for WordPress website development services that offer you a built equipped with all essentials like ARIA.

So, what is ARIA?

ARIA is an abbreviation of Accessible Rich Internet Application. It is basically a method of specifying HTML’s attributes so that it gets identified by screen readers accurately to passage the same to end users.

It falls under one of the key aspects of accessible website development that further contribute to more exact UX for users. Incorporating ARIA in your WordPress site comes handy when you tend to enhance its accessibility amongst internet users.

How to Incorporate ARIA in WordPress HTML?

Now when we are aware of the meaning and need of ARIA for enhanced website accessibility, let start with some best ways to incorporate the same in WordPress site HTML below:-

As we all know, only native HTML alone can’t make for accessible web content and there remains a scope of conflict with ARIA, if not used Semantic HTML correctly.

To name a few, semantic elements are <nav>, <header>, etc. that generally describe the HTML purpose. It would be a redundant job to incorporate ARIA into these. Adding to this, ARIA incorporation comes with some rules that developers need to consider.

Below is a table presented by W3C (World Web Consortium) that displays the HTML elements with ARIA roles’ implication:-

Once you have completely understood this table, you can try using roles and attributes to WordPress HTML tags. 

Talking about Roles, there is no need to assign role to the element, if it is semantic and implies role Or, your new assigned role is conflicting with its implied role. Also, you need to remember that there is only one rule applied to each element.

To better understand this- a role indicates the elements’ identity like what it is and what it will do. So, a single element cannot be two things at similar times. So, while assigning try to use the best role that fits in for the element.

In the above-illustrated example, it is clearly stated that the alert will be contained within a header, instead of stating it twice under both alert and header.

Now, we will talk about including Attributes to properties and note states. Attributes are the second element of ARIA and slightly differ from roles. Rather than simply defining an element, attributes communicate some more important instructions to screen readers regarding a particular element.

Here, States shares information related to dynamic features that change with every user interaction. For e.g., radio buttons, etc. 

Properties refer to the features that are fixed and won’t change with any kind of user interaction. You can easily spot these as both always begin with ‘aria-’ followed by state or property.

In Conclusion

When it comes to enhancing website User Experience, delivering accessible content is quite important. Apparently, it is ignored by many of us.

However, it shouldn’t be the scenario and you need to follow the best web accessibility practices, and try to incorporate ARIA HTML in your WordPress site.

For any kind of queries or concerns, you can write back to me anytime.