Should I be using WAI-ARIA in my website builds? Will it have any benefit? Is anyone adding 'role' to their code at the moment?

The tab, link, checkbox and slider roles, plus many more, aren't available yet for HTML5. From looking at the list of what is available (see below), and what will be coming in the future, it looks like we might be applying roles to a huge amount of tags on our pages. Its not an issue especially if it brings benefit to users using readers etc

Also, a side question, will search engines give any benefits to sites using WAI-ARIA?

List of safe roles to use (I think)

•   role="article"
•   role="banner"
•   role="complementary"
•   role="contentinfo"
•   role="form"
•   role="heading"
•   role="main"
•   role="navigation"
•   role="search"

Examples of usage:

<header role="banner"></div>for a main header, banner only allowed once per page

<header role="heading"></div>- for all headers after the main one

<aside role="complementary"></aside>

<form role="search"></form>