A practical checklist for ARIA labels
Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Run through this the next time ARIA labels comes up.
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
The checklist
- No ARIA is better than wrong ARIA
- Use it only when native elements cannot do the job
- Labels must match what the control actually does
- Someone is named as the owner
- There is a date to review it again
The reason this keeps coming up
No ARIA is better than wrong ARIA. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
What this looks like day to day
Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about ARIA labels before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Labels must match what the control actually does — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.