Today I downloaded the latest copy of the HTML editor. My attention was directed to the Sementic data tab. Therefore I started reading Chanpter 7 of the online manual: "Semantic markup". Not so easy to understand after one time reading, but I get the point. The question which came up to me was: how does this compare to the html5 aria roles? Are they interchangable, live they side by side, or...?

I'm no expert on this due to not having used much of it, but my understanding of WAI-ARIA is, that it was mainly created to help people with disabilities, so that they could quickly navigate to the main content of a web page and not get caught up in banners, advets etc.
With Semantic markup the main goal seems to be helping users of search engines to find what they are looking for.

Maybe one is as good as the other for both the mentioned user groups, I don't know really. Maybe someone else here may give a better answer.

As I understand those are for search engine reason
This site http://schema.org/ provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.

For example if you search for an item let say a pizza, it gives you full detail in search result, such as price, calorie, location , picture and so on in initial result. if you search in Google you can see some websites have full detail in search result and some don't.


Hans sorry for asking here, did you check the issue with Changing the background-color of submit button in Responsive Layout Maker forum?
I guess I found solution for the issue you had having, please check that out.

Thanks guys. I let it sink in and doubt a bit further about using aria roles along "structured data". Can be very complicated I am afraid. I wonder how relevant aria roles are today, given the more semantic tags in html5 like nav, article and so on.

@Mansour. Oh yes and I spent quite some time on this topic and by now I am a bit wiser and more confused.
(And my button still is gray , so I have to do more homework).