Much like HTML, ARIA evolves, adding new functionality over time.
There’s some interesting up and coming ARIA features worth being aware of. aria-errormessage and aria-description are a couple of new attributes that have sparked my interest.
aria-errormessage will work in combination with aria-invalid="true". If an input is flagged as invalid then the value of aria-errormessage will be announced. This has potential to be useful. However, it would need using with caution. We don’t want to be creating two very different user experiences for those using a screen reader and those who are not.
aria-description will enable us to provide supplementary descriptions to an element. A great use here would be where visually an elements purpose is clear, but lost when announced via a screen-reader. For example, a breadcrumb trail, using aria-description we could describe the final breadcrumb as ‘You are here’ (aria-description="You are here:").
As mentioned, these are up and coming, which means support currently remains limited. It’s still good to be aware of what is coming in the future.
WebAIM have a written a great blog post about Up and Coming ARIA. This includes an evaluation of current support for the new features.
As always with ARIA, if you can implement the functionality natively with HTML then that is preferable.