An increasing number of corporations are facing lawsuits for ignoring accessibility standards in their websites that results in huge settlements, which otherwise might have costed only a small percentage for developing accessible websites. So, it is important for both the business and IT teams to understand the value and effort required to build accessibility into their deliverable.
People with disabilities use to access the web. For example, visually impaired people will use a screen reader such as or JAWS to read the web content. Developers need to generate their web content in such a way that it should be understandable by the assistive technologies. The content and assistive tools require a common standard for communication. Understandably, W3 consortium created this common standard specification called WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications) to build accessible website.
In order to implement WAI-ARIA specification, developers are required to include to relevant HTML elements so that the assistive tools can understand their web content. Without these aria attributes, the websites are unusable by people with disabilities because their tools will not be able find the information they are looking for. In the below example, the html gives a brief additional information about the close button to the assistive tools.
<button aria-label="Close" aria-describedby="descriptionClose" onclick="myDialog.close">X</button> ... <div id="descriptionClose">Closing this window will discard any information entered and return you back to the main page</div>Reference: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/ARIA1.html#ARIA1-examples
Adding these few attributes in your content will not only light-up your websites to the people with disabilities, it could potentially save some money from being spent on legal issues.