Should I be using WAI-ARIA in my HTML website builds?

Question

Should I be using WAI-ARIA in my website builds? Will it have any benefit? Is anyone adding 'role' to their code at the moment?

Some info about WAI-ARIA - www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.

The tab, link, checkbox and slider roles, plus many more, aren't available yet for HTML5. From looking at the list of what is available (see below), and what will be coming in the future, it looks like we might be applying roles to a huge amount of tags on our pages. Its not an issue especially if it brings benefit to users using readers etc

Also, a side question, will search engines give any benefits to sites using WAI-ARIA?

List of safe roles to use (I think)

•   role="article"
•   role="banner"
•   role="complementary"
•   role="contentinfo"
•   role="form"
•   role="heading"
•   role="main"
•   role="navigation"
•   role="search"

Examples of usage in HTML5 code:

<header role="banner"></div>for a main header, banner only allowed once per page

<header role="heading"></div>- for all headers after the main one

<aside role="complementary"></aside>

<form role="search"></form>

Answer 1

OK I have been doing some thinking and research around this since you asked this.

It is now my opinion that you should use them, and I intend to start bringing them into projects.

Just because they aren't available doesn't mean they can't be parsed by assistive technologies and if they help to even add a little bit of semantic value then why not?

If more webmasters adopted WAI-ARIA we could start to see more of the benefits and limitations.

Since there are some positives, and no negatives (save the slight bump in write time and HTML size) I say go for it.

Here is an interesting blog post on the subject.