Day 13: ARIA Roles Model, Part 1

Published on 12 Dec 2018

• journal
• was
• aria

The WAI-ARIA specification is a doozy! Today I waded into The Roles Model, after feeling a bit lost in some of the earlier parts of the spec. I was feeling pretty run down by the end of my day, so I only spent half an hour on this spec, mostly trying to get my bearings.

• Began reading The Roles Model section of the WAI-ARIA 1.1 specification.
• Added all the roles and their type to the ARIA sheet of my WAS Certification Prep spreadsheet.

I didn't realize just how many roles there were in ARIA! Spoiler: there are 82, if you count the abstract roles. Each role falls into a category:

1. Abstract (don't use these)
2. Widget
3. Document structure
4. Landmark
5. Live region
6. Window

Abstract roles were new to me. Rightly so, since they are not supposed to be used in my code.

Document structure role="none"?? That one I'll have to research further. It sounds vaguely familiar from the Internet somewhere.

Out of all of these role types, I am the most familiar with landmark roles, even though I rarely use them, since I lean more on HTML5 landmarks.