ARIA momentum and Internet Explorer
UPDATE: Microsoft announced January 16, 2009 that they will now support ARIA properties and states according to spec. Cheers to Microsoft for making this move to support standards and accessible web development.
Momentum
WAI-ARIA, the W3C protocol for making rich internet applications more accessible, is gaining much momentum (Read the ARIA FAQ). Even though ARIA isn’t entirely finalized, it is currently supported in most of the major browsers and screen readers. New versions of browsers and assistive technologies are providing better and more extensive support with each release. Industry leaders, such as IBM and Mozilla, are pushing ARIA’s great momentum.
Implementing ARIA is getting easier. Tutorials and examples are being released each day. Common scripting libraries are providing better support – Dojo, YUI, and GWT have native support, with JQuery and many others beginning implementation of ARIA.
Developers can currently implement most of ARIA into their web applications with tremendous increases to accessibility.
Internet Explorer’s Non-standard Implementation
Perhaps the biggest barrier to ARIA implementation is that it is not yet supported in Internet Explorer. It’s difficult to truly recommend a technology that does nothing in the most popular web browser. [...]