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Lupita Rivera
Lupita Rivera

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What is ARIA & why is Important t use?

ARIA, or the Accessible Rich Internet Applications suite, is a set of standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to help make the web more accessible to people with disabilities. These standards provide a set of attributes that can be added to HTML elements to provide additional information about the element's role, state, and behavior to assistive technologies such as screen readers.

Using ARIA is important for several reasons:

  1. Improved accessibility: ARIA attributes help to provide additional context and information about elements on the page to assistive technologies, which can improve the accessibility of the page for users with disabilities.

  2. Better user experience: By providing additional information about the purpose and behavior of elements on the page, ARIA can help to improve the overall user experience for all users, not just those with disabilities.

  3. Legal compliance: In many countries, there are laws and regulations that require websites to be accessible to people with disabilities. Using ARIA can help to ensure that a website is compliant with these requirements.

  4. SEO benefits: Google has stated that it takes accessibility into account when ranking websites in search results. Using ARIA can help to improve a website's SEO by making it more accessible to search engines and users alike.

Using ARIA is not a replacement for good semantic HTML, but rather an additional tool that can be used to enhance the accessibility of a website. It is important to carefully consider the use of ARIA attributes and to ensure that they are used appropriately and in conjunction with good semantic HTML.

In summary, ARIA is an important tool for improving the accessibility and usability of websites for people with disabilities, and its use can also bring benefits for all users and for SEO.

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