A short guide to ARIA labels

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Everything we would tell a client about ARIA labels in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What is actually at stake

No ARIA is better than wrong ARIA. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Where to start

Use it only when native elements cannot do the job. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

What to watch for

Labels must match what the control actually does. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

In practice

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.