The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) have just announced the latest addition to their accessibility stable – the ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) Roadmap, which will make dynamic web content accessible.

The Roadmap is essentially a suite of documents made up of:

* the WAI-ARIA Roadmap itself – addresses the accessibility of dynamic Web content by describing “the technologies to map controls, AJAX live regions, and events to accessibility APIs, including custom controls used for Rich Internet Applications”. It also “outlines new navigation techniques to mark common Web structures such as menus, primary content, secondary content, banner information and other types of Web structures”, which can improve accessibility.

* Roles for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA Roles) – provides a means of identifying roles in dynamic web content, in order to improve interoperability with assistive technologies.

* States and Properties Module for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA States) – enables the behaviour of an element to be included in XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language), which can then be used in conjunction with assistive technologies or to dynamically render content via different style sheets.

Further information is available from the press release.