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In today’s world, the biggest challenge that developers come across is creating accessible and interactive web applications. It is crucial to ensure that the components are not only visually appealing but also fully accessible to all users. And it requires a deep understanding of multiple standards and best practices.
Integrating ARIA into your React projects is one of the simplest ways to ensure the accessibility and interactiveness of web applications. When you hire React developers having a strong understanding of ARIA to help you reach a wider audience and fulfill accessibility obligations.
In this blog post, we’ll explore React ARIA and its step-by-step guide to integrate it into your React projects.
What is ARIA?
React ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a powerful library that leverages the power of React hooks to seamlessly integrate UI components and make them accessible to developers. It offers a wide range of hooks and behaviors that simplify the complexities of WAI-ARIA specifications – ensuring that components developers build are accessible to users with disabilities.
Moreover, it also aims to close the gap between the demand for complex components and the requirement for accessibility while delivering an effective solution.
Key Features of ARIA
Here are the salient key features of React ARIA:
- Accessibility
Accessibility is one of the foremost features of React ARIA. It includes adherence to ARIA attributes, focus management, keyboard navigation, and support for assistive technologies such as screen readers.
- Behavior Hooks
React ARIA’s library provides a wide range of behavior hooks that encompass the logic for common UI patterns like toggle buttons, menus, and dialogs. These hooks also manage focus, keyboard interactions, and other accessibility features that help the developers create complex components easily. React Aria offers a variety of hooks and components, such as useButton, useCheckbox, useSlider, useFocusRing, useCombobox, and many others.
- Extensive Customizability
React ARIA offers unstyled components which means developers have full control for customizabilty. The unstyled components also allow customizations with pre-existing design systems.
- Focus Management
React ARIA also includes hooks for managing focus within components. It also ensures that users can navigate the UI using a keyboard or other input methods.
Architecture of ARIA
React ARIA is primarily designed to allow resuing component behavior between design systems. However, each component is divided into three parts: behavior, state, and the rendered component. Let’s have a bird eye view of it’s architecture:
- State Hook
A State Hook is used to manage the internal state of a component, specifically in relation to accessibility features. These hooks help in handling complex state management for components and ensure they work seamlessly and consistently when it comes to user interactions.
For instance, if a developer is creating a toggle button, a State Hook can manage whether the button is currently “on” or “off.”
- Behavior Hook
A Behavior Hook encompasses the logic and interactions that are necessary for implementing common user interface (UI) patterns while ensuring accessibility.
These hooks provide pre-defined behaviors that manage state, keyboard interactions, focus management, and other accessibility features according to WAI-ARIA guidelines.
With this hook, developers can easily incorporate complex accessibility behaviors into the components without manually writing and managing complex logic,
- Component
The component integrates the state and behavior hooks provided by the library and it is also referred to as high-level abstraction. These components are comprised of dialogue, a menu, and a button.
Steps for Integrating ARIA into a Project
Step 1: Understanding the Role of ARIA
ARIA is a set of attributes that define ways to make web content and web applications more accessible. It doesn’t change the functionality of an application but rather improves the communication between the application and assistive technologies.
The first step in integrating ARIA is understanding its various roles, states, and properties. There are different ARIA attributes that one should know like role, aria-live, aria-label, aria-checked, and more.
Step 2: Identifying Components that Need ARIA
In a React application, every component does not require ARIA attributions. It is important to identify which specific parts need ARIA integration.
It is advisable to focus more on custom components like buttons, menus, forms, and models.
Step 3: Applying ARIA Roles
After the identification of the components that need ARIA, the next step is to apply ARIA roles. Roles explain the type of element dealing with (e.g., button, checkbox, dialog).
Step 4: Managing ARIA Properties
ARIA properties allow to provide additional information about the managing components. For instance, if there is a toggle button, one can use the ARIA-pressed attribute to indicate its current state.
Conclusion
React ARIA is a powerful tool for extensive customization of React components and the development of accessibility. By following the above-mentioned steps, one can ensure that the application not only meets accessibility standards but also provides a better user experience.
If you’re looking to create accessible web applications, hire React developers having a strong understanding of ARIA.
References
1.ARIA Attributes in React Accessibility
2.Creating Accessible Custom Components with React Aria: A Practical Example with Forms