WAI-ARIA makes life much easier

I decided to re-post here my comment to the A List Apart article, Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA, as it seemed from most of the other comments that people don't really see just how much WAI-ARIA will help both developers and users.

In the current methods of adding screen reader support (see an example at Juicy Studio with excellent descriptions), it takes a lot of scripting in order to dynamically inform a screen reader that things have changed. These methods also rip the user out of whatever they’ve started reading or writing at that time, and drop their cursor wherever the change occurs. The later versions of Jaws don’t quite do that, but in order to support a broader user base, you need to do it that way...Jaws costs a lot of money for an individual to keep paying for every year.

With WAI-ARIA, this gets handled just by adding an attribute of aaa:live, and you can fully control the urgency with which the screen reader will read the updated DOM elements! This not only keeps the user in their current context, but allows “polite” live elements to wait for the user to complete their current task before the user needs to hear it. Errors and other urgent information can either user “assertive” or “rude” in the worst case scenarios.

This doesn’t even touch on some of the benefits of the other attributes available, but just the aaa:live attribute itself makes screen reader support infinitely easier to implement and much, much more flexible.

You can see some good examples on the Firevox (open source, cross platform Firefox screen reader) site.

Yes, this very new working draft has some time and work before it exists as a specification. But it needs support from developers in order to take off some of its rough edges, and for the more widely-used screen readers to start paying closer attention. WAI-ARIA can only help developers and we have every reason to help push this project forward.

Note: I edited the comment to use actual links and markup...and to fix some spelling errors.