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>

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Using the aria-current attribute – Tink