ARIA is a set of attributes that can be added to HTML elements
(and other markup languages) to communicate accessibility role, state,
name and properties which are exposed by browsers via platform accessibility APIs.
This provides a common, interoperable method of relaying the
information to assistive technologies. That’s it. It is the same method
used by browsers to convey the inbuilt (or default) accessibility
information of native HTML features. The difference being that authors
can wire up this information for themselves in the DOM using ARIA,
before they could not.
A simple example of what ARIA does and does not do:
ARIA does not magically make any element act differently to
what it is, it only provides a method to make it appear as
something else to assistive technology users. For example, in the sample
code below, the ARIA role attribute makes the <div> appear as a link to assistive technology. Developers must provide the substance to the semantics conveyed using ARIA, otherwise users are confronted with a UI masquerade.
<div role="link">poot</div>
versus
<a href="...">poot</a>
