Victor Tsarin asked on Twitter
Safari4 final came out but I don’t see any #ARIA improvements. Do you?
The Safari 4 New features page talks about ARIA support
Safari supports Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA). The ARIA standard helps web developers make dynamic web content more accessible for people with disabilities. With ARIA, sites taking advantage of advanced technologies like AJAX and JavaScript can now easily interoperate with assistive technologies.
This prompted me to update the testing of the ARIA Role Support in Safari. The findings indicate minimal mapping of ARIA roles to the accessibility API’s on MAC and none on Windows.
Possible reasons for the disparity between claimed support and testing results:
- Incorrect testing methdology.
- Only supported on latest version of MAC OS.
- Support does not use the standard accessibility API’s.
- Overzealous marketing department.
Note: Using the Safari Web Inspector Tool (on MAC or Windows) the role attribute is not listed in the properties tab of elements that have a role attribute.
Supported Accessibility Roles (Safari HTML Reference)
Having just published this article, I then found the Safari documentation describing accessibility roles from the WAI-ARIA specification that are supported in Safari. It states:
WebKit now has elementary support for the WAI-ARIA specification.
It goes on to list the roles it supports, which are pretty much the same as the results from the testing I conducted
Summary
WAI-ARIA has 59 possible role values (excluding abstract roles):
- Safari 4 Beta on MAC exposes 15 role values correctly via The MAC accessibility API
- Safari 4.0 on MAC exposes 17 role values correctly via The MAC accessibility API
- Safari 4 Beta on Windows exposes 8 role values correctly via MSAA
- Safari 4.0 on Windows exposes 0 role values correctly via MSAA
Software used for testing
- MAC OS X 10.4.11
- Safari 4 beta
- Safari 4.0
- Accessibility UIElementInspector
Detailed Results
ARIA role tests on MAC and Windows – Safari 4 beta & Safari 4.0
