6. ARIA Forms

This is part of the ARIA Best Practices document. There may be discussion {todo: edit link} about this page; please use the discussion page to address issues and add only content to this page.

ARIA Forms: Invalid and Required roles

Until the introduction of ARIA's Invalid and Required roles, only presentational strategies have been available to web content authors to indicate that certain form fields and controls are required or invalid. In applications, the state of controls currently unavailable is indicated with a "greyed out" appearance. In web-based forms, fields required may be marked by an asterisk. Forms submitted with required data missing or improperly specified may be redisplayed with the unacceptable elements highlighted in red. The assistive technology user is poorly served by such imprecise methods, and all users confront inconsistent indicators for consistent situations.

The ARIA Invalid and Required roles provide:

A programatic Required indicator that all user agents, including especially assistive technologies, can represent to users in a consistent and modality appropriate manner.
A programatic Invalid role that can be used to indicate which data fields have incorrect data. This enables all user agents, including both mainstream browsers and assistive technology applications, to indicate this eternally common circumstance to users consistently, in a user-appropriate modality.
A programatic mechanism, the Invalid role, to indicate currently unavailable controls in Web 2.0 applications (which a user agent may choose to display as "greyed out").