Quick Developers Guide for ARIA

Problem

Developers across Verizon's UI teams had no single reference for when ARIA roles and attributes were actually required versus already covered by native HTML semantics, which led to inconsistent, sometimes redundant accessibility markup and preventable a11y bugs reaching production.

Approach

• Authored a Quick Developers Guide for ARIA, mapping every major HTML tag to its equivalent or complementary ARIA role, marked Yes, Situational, or No for whether it's actually mandatory.
• Collaborated with fellow accessibility specialists Bill Tyler, Tim White, and Stema Peter across six documented revisions, incorporating their suggestions, examples, and corrections.
• Added quick tips for real edge cases: hidden labels with visible hints, when link titles are actually needed, required-field ARIA, live regions, and readonly versus disabled semantics.
• Included sourced references and a polyfill recommendation (AccessifyHTML5.js) so developers could go deeper without leaving the doc.

Outcome

Developers had one place to check instead of guessing, and accessibility bugs measurably dropped once teams started referencing the guide before implementation instead of catching issues in QA.