Web applications often have accessibility issues. Anything can be a button or a dialog box. There's no way for a screen reader to know about the functionality of those elements, and often they can't receive keyboard focus. The W3C standards draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) addresses those issues. The presentation addresses: a) The accessibility problems introduced by the current trend of web applications. b) New ways to add semantic meaning, communicate importance, define relationships, and give focus to elements using WAI-ARIA. c) How to limit the impact of these problems whilst WAI-ARIA is gaining support by user-agents, and (X)HTML / DOM techniques that work right now.
http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/programming/panels_schedule/?action=show&id=IAP060400