Today is the 36th annual World Hello Day.

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Hello, world.

I have updated the accessibility extension to display all WAI-ARIA properties.

ARIA Properties

I've added a function to the toolbar to display all ARIA roles and properties defined in a document. The properties are displayed in a new tab, along with the value of the property, the element the role is defined on, the parent nodes, and the markup fragment. The following is example output from running the function.

The properties functionality is a catch-all to report all ARIA properties. The toolbar can highlight live regions, document landmark roles, and general roles individually.

I have updated the accessibility extension to display all WAI-ARIA roles.

ARIA Roles

ARIA introduces the role attribute to help define widgets, such as a tree, and define page structure, such as the navigation section. The accessibility toolbar displays the roles defined in a document in a new tab, along with the element the role is defined on, the parent nodes, and the markup fragment. The following is example output from running the extension.

At the moment, there isn't a check to ensure that the role provide is a valid role. The next version of this toolbar will highlight invalid role names.

I have updated the accessibility extension to investigate WAI-ARIA document landmark roles.

Document Landmark Roles

WAI-ARIA defines document landmark roles to help define the structure of a document. Document landmark roles have two purposes; they help assistive technology users orientate themselves within a document, and they provide a mechanism for users to navigate documents. The following document landmark roles are defined in ARIA.

article

Content that makes sense in its own right, such as a complete blog post, a comment on a blog, a post in a forum, and so on.

banner

Site-orientated content, such as the title of the page and the logo.

complementary

Supporting content for the main content, but meaningful in its own right when separated from the main content. For example, the weather listed on a portal.

contentinfo

Child content, such as footnotes, copyrights, links to privacy statement, links to preferences, and so on.

main

Content that is directly related to or expands on the central content of the document.

navigation

Content that contains the links to navigate this document and/or related documents.

search

This section contains a search form to search the site.

The following markup example specifies the document landmark roles for the banner, navigation, and main to create the page structure for a typical web document.

<div role="banner">
...
</div>
<div role="navigation">
...
</div>
<div role="main">
...
</div>

Document Landmark Roles Extension

The accessibility extension includes a menu item to investigate the document landmark roles. The extension draws an outline around the elements containing document landmark roles, along with the name of the landmark role.

This website contains document landmark regions for main, search, navigation, and complementary, so is ideal for testing this extension. Document landmark roles are an easy ARIA win, so add them to your website and let me know the results of using this extension so I can ensure it works properly.

Known issues

When document landmark roles are contained in other document landmark roles, the name of the role might be written over the top of other document landmark roles. This will be fixed, but is a low priority at the moment, as the scenario is rare. The final version of this extension is likely to present all roles in a separate dialog.

TPG are working with the Mozilla foundation to develop accessibility testing tools. Specifically, we're developing WAI-ARIA tools, as well as improving accessibility of mainstream tools such as Firebug and providing ARIA testing features in mainstream developer tools.

As part of that work, this Firefox extension examines WAI-ARIA's Live Regions (this functionality will eventually be incorporated into a WAT for Firefox extension). The live regions extension is currently available in a toolbar with the latest versions of the colour contrast analyser and table inspector extensions.

I plan to add a set of accessibility auditing functions to this toolbar to make it easier for people to test websites for accessibility. At the moment, the toolbar consists of just three functions:

• Live Regions
• Colour Contrast Analyser
• Table Inspector

Live Regions

The live regions function adds elements with live regions defined into the tab order. When the elements are examined, a dialog is presented with 3 sections.

• The ARIA markup
• A table containing the relevant ARIA attributes
• An explanation of the ARIA markup

Visit iCITA live region examples to see live regions in action.

Colour Contrast Analyser

The colour contrast analyser examines the foreground and background colours of text nodes, and produces a report to determine if the contrast is adequate according to the AERT algorithm and the WCAG's luminosity colour contrast algorithm.

Table Inspector

The table inspector reveals the accessibility properties such as the summary and headers for table cells.

Download the Extension

Download the Juicy Studio Accessibility Toolbar from Firefox Add-ons. Unfortunately, the extension is sandboxed at the moment, which means you have to have an account in order to download the extension. Hopefully, the extension will be reviewed by someone that understands the purpose of the extension and remove it from the sandbox section (although the reviewer of the colour contrast analyser decided to leave it in the sandbox).

The HTML5 Validator can be used to validate WAI-ARIA markup.

I found out today from Henri Sivonen on the Free ARIA list that the HTML5 validator can be used to validate ARIA markup. This is incredibly useful, as up to now, the only way I knew of verifying ARIA was to test with assistive technology. Of course, it's always good to test with assistive technology, but it's more convenient to use a validator while developing.

Using the validator will obviously give errors for things that aren't in the HTML 5 specification, such as using an HTML 4.01 doctype. But they can be ignored, or you can use the direct input just to add the ARIA parts you want to validate. This is a great discovery that will make authoring ARIA a lot easier.

Martin Kliehm has put together a proposal for an ARIA panel for South by Southwest (SXSW) - March 13-17, 2009 in Austin, Texas.

Martin, Steve Faulkner, a developer from Mozilla/IBM and myself plan to hold a panel with hands-on examples of real world ARIA. The panel will include common design patterns, common gotchas, and general best practice for implementing ARIA.

ARIA is a positive and enabling technology. Rather than telling developers what they can't do, ARIA allows developers to create accessible web applications. What's more, it's easy. If you're interested in seeing our panel, vote using the SXSW Interactive panel picker before the 29th August. It's a great event, and we had a great time last year - hopefully, we'll get a chance to discuss ARIA with you at SXSW.

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Opera launch the Web Standards Curriculum; a set of tutorials and articles promoting web standards.

At Opera, we've heard lots of anecdotes about the poor quality of education out there, with web design being stuck in the late 90s (mal-)practice. The fact that graduates are hitting the job market without any idea of web standards, accessibility or user-centric design is bad for our industry, bad for all industry because every organisation needs a webs site, and it's bad for the Web itself.

So we decided to do something about it. The brainchild of Chris Mills, our Developer Relationship Manager, who's been working for 9 years or so eductating people about Standards, we've launched the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. It's a free, creative commons licensed course designed to give anyone a solid grounding in web design/development, no matter who they are — it is completely free to use, accessible, and assumes no previous knowledge.

At the moment there are 23 tutorials and exercises, but we're planning to expand them to about 50 by the end of the Summer. We hope that the curriculum will be adopted or adapted by universities, colleges, corporate in-house training programmes, or used by individuals trying to better their skills.

If you're an educator and would like help in using the curriculum, get in touch. If you have an idea for more coursework, or spot an ambiguity or even (shudder) an error, please let us know on the Web Standards Curriculum forums — it's a collaborative course, to be shared and changed to suit your local needs.

Or just spread the word, and help us educate the next generation of web professionals.

The Colour Contrast Analyser, Table Inspector, and Glossary of Terms Firefox extensions have all been updated to be compatible with Firefox version 3.

Firefox 3 Extensions

Some time ago, I decided to host my Firefox extensions on Juicy Studio, as I found hosting and administrating the extensions through Mozilla's add-ons interface cumbersome, and unintuitive. Users are also expected to be signed up members of Mozilla add-ons to be able to download extensions, unless they have been reviewed by an expert user; in which case, anyone can download them.

With Firefox 3, extensions must come from a secure server, which I don't have, so I've been forced to revert back to using Mozilla's add-ons page. If you are a member, you can download the extensions now. If not, I've submitted extensions for review, but I've no idea when they will be available to the general public.

Roberto Scano has written the first ever book on the accessibility of web applications.

Accessibility of Web Applications

Roberto's book covers a wide range of topics to help developers of web applications ensure their applications are accessible. The book covers accessibility guidelines for authors (WCAG) 2, accessibility guidelines for authoring tools (ATAG) 2, accessibility guidelines for web application developers (WAI-ARIA), and much more, including guidance for multimedia used in Web Applications, such as Flash.

Contributors of the book include Oreste Signore, from the W3C Italian office, who provides the preface for the book, with Mike Paciello providing the introduction. T.V. Raman has a chapter describing in detail how web applications works, Charles Chen has a chapter on ARIA, and I have a chapter on Ajax, which covers notification techniques to supplement ARIA.

The book is in Italian, with an English version expected soon.