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Spec
Summary
The ARIA 1.1 spec has stabilized to the point that we can safely implement and ship it without any compatibility risks.
Is this feature supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?
Yes
Interoperability and Compatibility Risk
Very low, implementation is under way in Safari and Firefox too.
Entry on the feature dashboard
Requesting approval to ship?
Yes. There's little value in implementing ARIA attributes behind a flag. Typically browsers implement support for an ARIA attribute first, then assistive technology is updated to recognize it (if needed), and finally web developers start adopting it as it becomes more widely supported. Because of the two-sided nature of support (i.e. the new ARIA attributes have no effect until assistive technology is updated to support it too), there's little risk of web developers adopting and depending on an attribute before it's stable.
Notes
We've actually already shipped a bit of ARIA 1.1, mostly trivial changes like role=switch. As this version of the spec is nearly wrapped up and cross-platform test suites are being written, we'd like to complete the implementation in Chrome. Note that relative to the big picture of Chrome accessibility work, implementing ARIA 1.1 is a pretty small piece of it. Most of the changes are very straightforward to implement and provide incremental benefits over existing accessibility support. More of our focus is on improving performance and compatibility of existing accessibility support, and working on more significant spec changes such as the
Accessibility Object Model.
Changes in progress: