When ARIA labels is worth the effort

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. ARIA labels is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

When it is worth it

No ARIA is better than wrong ARIA. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How to decide

Labels must match what the control actually does. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The short version

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about ARIA labels before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• No ARIA is better than wrong ARIA — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.