WAI-ARIA Certification

Question

Is there a reputable certification that someone can obtain for W3C's WAI-ARIA specification?

Answer 1

I happened to find this posting on an Accessibility Consulting firm's blog which calls for some sort of professional certification for Information & Communication Technology Accessibility professionals - which would seem to imply that none exists yet.

If there was such a thing, it would likely be more broad-based than just for WAI-ARIA; ARIA is a technique used in specific scenarios, and is only part of a broader set of accessibility techniques and issues. While some pages might require ARIA to make them accessible, other pages might be fully accessible without needing ARIA, while others might have perfect ARIA implementations even while having other major accessibility issues - such as lacking keyboard support or lacking meaningful document structure.

It's perhaps also worth nothing that while the ARIA spec is pretty stable, implementations, both in browsers and screenreaders, are still evolving. For example, aria-live is partially but not fully supported per spec in the current generation of JAWS and NVDA. This requires developers to keep up with current implementation details and test against various screenreader/browser combinations. And regardless of what the spec says, there's no substitute at the end of the day for actually testing to verify accessibility. All this makes certification somewhat tricky, as the body of knowledge is still changing.

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As for resources; WebAIM - Accessibility In Mind is a great place to start, and covers the broad accessibility picture, with links to other resources.