Are there any microformats designed for accessibility purposes?

Question

And are they supported by accessibile browsers (readers)?

I guess the question is pretty simple. Can I signal in my classnames that this is a search field, this is a box with popular tags, these are the main navigation links, this is a box with the latest comments, this is a link for your profile page, you can logout with this link, and so on...

Answer 1

The short answer is no. The longer answer is WAI-ARIA can do some of what you want but there's no guarantee that screen readers will support it. For a discussion of WAI-ARIA roles see http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles Pay particular attention to section 5.4, things like banner and contentinfo may be useful to you. Do not depend on WAI-ARIA support though; make sure that you use good HTML including descriptive alt tags and headings to separate your document into appropriate sections.

Answer 2

Jared nailed it from a technical point of view. WAI-ARIA is the way forward.

Just wanted to add that there have in fact been some concerns about how microformats impact accessibility. Two posts to read on this:

1. hAccessibility
2. BBC Withdrawing Some Microformats over Accessibility Concerns

I do use microformats as a guideline for building more semantic HTML, but I ignore some of the constructs that I know can cause accessibility problem, specifically the use of <abbr>.