Richmond Leader

Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin is looking to reach out to voters with disabilities as he adds software to his website that will make it more accessible for voters with disabilities. 

Youngkin has added an ARIA label to his campaign website, which transitions to a toolbar ensuring that his website is ADA compliant, along with increased accessibility for Virginians.

ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, a set of features that can be added to HTML components that distinguish ways to make web content and applications comprehensible to users with disabilities who use assistive technologies. 

The website Lullabot said, “Support for ARIA is most definitely growing. Those who do support ARIA include browsers, AT [i.e. screen readers, magnifiers, text-to-speech], applications and JavaScript toolkits. It’s a very complex set of standards, so complete support is difficult to achieve. Even so, almost all current versions of the technologies mentioned do support at least some of ARIA.”

ARIA is designed to help fill the bridge gaps when accessibility issues cannot be managed with the traditional HTML. 

Youngkin's Democratic opponent is former governor Terry McAuliffe.

The American Booksellers Association has reported that the ADA compliance now extends to websites with owners of websites who fail to comply putting themselves in the crosshairs of legal challenges.  

“Accessible websites support people who may use assistive technology to navigate the Internet, foster a more welcoming environment within the book community, and help to reach a greater population,” the association added.