The W3C’s standards draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) addresses those limitations. It provides new ways of communicating meaning, importance, and relationships, and it fills gaps in the (X)HTML specifications and increases usability for all users by enabling navigation models familiar from desktop applications. Best of all, you can start using ARIA right away to enhance the accessibility of your websites.

I held talks about the upcoming standards in Cologne and Frankfurt, which resulted in writing a blog entry about the topic that eventually became an article for A List Apart.

Update: there’s also a German translation of the article at Barrierekompass.

If you’d like to learn more I’ll be speaking at the BarCamp in Frankfurt on April 21-22, and the Infopark Internet Congress in Berlin on May 11th.