What is the meaning of the 'aria-describedby' property?

Question

The following HTML is inserted by the jQuery Grid plugin:

<td role="gridcell" style="" aria-describedby="list_createdBy">Sam</td>

What is the meaning of the 'aria-describedby' property?

Answer 1

This is described in the aria specification. It gives the id of an element that provides some additional information about the current element that some users might need.

Answer 2

Here below is an example of how you could use the aria-describedby property. It is used when you have a text that has information about the element. Aria-describedby must be the same as the id of the text that describes it.

First name: <input aria-describedby="name" type="text"> <em id="name">Your first name must be correct.</em>