The Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) specification, the vocabulary that tells assistive technology what a piece of interface is, published its 1.3 Working Draft on June 4. Three changes matter to anyone building a component library. Two new document structure roles, sectionheader and sectionfooter, give a name to the parts of a section that are not its content. A notify method lets an application announce something to a screen reader without the hidden live region trick that every library has reimplemented. And the draft forbids aria-hidden on the document root, closing the way a single attribute could hide an entire page.
It is a draft. The status section is careful to say it may change. I think library teams should wire these in now anyway, behind flags, for a reason that has little to do with the spec text.
Screen reader behavior for a new role or method is set by whoever ships first, not by the working group. The browsers and assistive technologies that implement the draft will make choices about how a sectionheader is announced and how a notification interrupts, and the libraries that are already using those features will shape those choices through bug reports and feedback. The libraries that wait for Recommendation will inherit whatever was decided without them.
A flag costs little. Being in the conversation is worth more than the flag.
Does your component library track accessibility drafts, or wait for the final text?
Photo source: https://photos.robertstowe.com/niagara