By Genevieve Nelson | Originally published at www.c2experience.com

Editor’s Note: Since this article was published, The C2 Group has created role-specific checklists for content creators, graphic designers, and web developers. You can download all three checklists here.

What if I told you there are a set of roles, states, and properties that enhance HTML for the purpose of accessibility?

What if I told you you’re probably already implementing some of them?

This set of features is called ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), and there is a lot of long documentation written by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) on the subject. The lengthiness and verbosity of these documents alone can be intimidating. Let’s take it one step at a time. This article is meant to highlight a part of one document.

The core of the ARIA Practices document lies in the Design Patterns and Widgets section, which provides design patterns for building things like inclusive menus, tabs, and dialog boxes by using ARIA and keyboard commands. Immediately following that is the less sexy Landmark Regions section, which we’re going to look at now.