"At React Advanced 2025, Aurora Scharff presented Building Interactive Async UI with React 19 and Ariakit and shared how ARIAKit, an open-source accessibility library, enables developers to build custom UI components that meet WCAG standards without requiring deep accessibility expertise. The presentation showcased a practical approach to combining ARIAKit's unstyled primitives with modern React patterns to create production-ready, accessible interfaces."
"ARIAKit provides unstyled, accessible UI primitives that handle keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and ARIA attributes automatically. The library, which has gained adoption in major projects including WordPress Gutenberg and WooCommerce, follows WAI-ARIA standards while allowing complete styling freedom. Unlike fully styled component libraries, ARIAKit exports composable primitives that developers can customize with any styling solution, including Tailwind CSS."
"However, many development teams lack dedicated accessibility resources, creating a gap between design requirements and implementation capabilities. Starting with a non-accessible account selector component, the demonstration showed common accessibility failures including missing keyboard navigation, non-functional escape key handling, and absent screen reader support. The initial implementation relied on generic div elements with manual state management through multiple useState hooks and verbose event handling code."
ARIAKit is an open-source accessibility library that provides unstyled UI primitives handling keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and ARIA attributes automatically. The library follows WAI-ARIA standards and powers major projects including WordPress Gutenberg and WooCommerce while allowing complete styling freedom and composability with any styling solution such as Tailwind CSS. Many development teams lack dedicated accessibility resources, making WCAG compliance challenging and legally mandated in some jurisdictions. Custom components often fail accessibility due to missing keyboard handling, ineffective escape key behavior, and absent screen reader support; replacing generic elements and manual state with ARIAKit primitives centralizes interaction state and improves accessibility.
Read at InfoQ
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]