Snippets

Using the aria-current attribute

It is common on the web for the current thing in a collection to be highlighted visually, but providing an alternative for screen reader users has often involved something of a hack. The aria-current attribute is intended to solve this problem.

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Here’s the official attribute definition:

Indicates the element that represents the current item within a container or set of related elements. The aria-current attribute is an enumerated type. Any value not included in the list of allowed values should be treated by assistive technologies as if the value true had been provided. If the attribute is not present or its value is an empty string, the default value of false applies and the aria-current state must not be exposed by user agents or assistive technologies.

According to the ARIA 1.1 specification, the aria-current attribute can be given one of a predefined set of values (enumerated tokens):

page
represents the current page within a set of pages;
step
represents the current step within a process;
location
represents the current location within an environment or context;
date
represents the current date within a collection of dates;
time
represents the current time within a set of times;
true
represents the current item within a set;
false
does not represent item within a set.

So the aria-current attribute can be used to solve the first use case in this post like this:

Code language: CSS

[aria-current] {
  font-weight: bold;
  background-color: #cc33ff;
}

Code language: HTML

<nav>
  <ul>
    <li><a href="/" aria-current="page">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/">About</a></li>
    <li><a href="/">Contact</a></li>
  </ul>
</nav>

When a screen reader encounters the link identified with aria-current, it will announce something like “Home, current page link”.

Whenever aria-current is used with a value other than true, that information is incorporated into the screen reader announcement. For example in this set of steps, a screen reader will announce “Do this, current step link”.

Code language: HTML

<ol>
  <li><a href="/" aria-current="step">Do this</a></li>
  <li><a href="/">Do that</a></li>
  <li><a href="/">Do the other</a></li>
</ol>

It's more than just the words, or owning your data and experimenting on your own site

As we move our code to CodePen, our writing to Medium, our photographs to Instagram we don’t just run the risk of losing that content and the associated metadata if those services vanish. We also lose our own place to experiment and add personality to that content, in the context of our own home on the web.

Clean Code: JavaScript

This is excellent and you should read it all.

Software engineering principles, from Robert C. Martin’s book Clean Code, adapted for JavaScript. This is not a style guide. It’s a guide to producing readable, reusable, and refactorable software in JavaScript.

Not every principle herein has to be strictly followed, and even fewer will be universally agreed upon. These are guidelines and nothing more, but they are ones codified over many years of collective experience by the authors of Clean Code.

Our craft of software engineering is just a bit over 50 years old, and we are still learning a lot. When software architecture is as old as architecture itself, maybe then we will have harder rules to follow. For now, let these guidelines serve as a touchstone by which to assess the quality of the JavaScript code that you and your team produce.

One more thing: knowing these won’t immediately make you a better software developer, and working with them for many years doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes. Every piece of code starts as a first draft, like wet clay getting shaped into its final form. Finally, we chisel away the imperfections when we review it with our peers. Don’t beat yourself up for first drafts that need improvement. Beat up the code instead!