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The situation for new HTML5 elements is different and likely to remain so for some time. It will be years before New HTML5 elements get robust accessibility support implemented across browsers and platforms. This is particularly so for non interactive elements such as the new HTML5 structural elements because  accessibility APIs in general do not have defined roles for many non interactive elements. In this case it is recommended to add the appropriate ARIA roles to elements that are meant to convey meaning but are effectively meaningless due to lack of implemented accessibility support. For example, adding role=navigation to a nav element fills the gaps in support for HTML5 semantics as ARIA  is more robustly  supported by most modern browsers and assistive technology:

Any web designer or developer with her heart in the right place knows that, to be accessible, every image requires an alt text. Except when it doesn’t.

In this case, then, it is better to use the null alt (alt=”“), and that is what we did in the A List Apart redesign.

FireEyes is offered free of charge from the makers of WorldSpace Sync, the most powerful accessibility software suite available. FireEyes is for individual, non-commercial use, and provides developers and QA testers the ability to check pages for accessibility issues, and provides help and support to solve the issues.

Some sites currently circumvent the validation problem by adding WAI-ARIA attributes to the source code via a script that is executed when the page loads.

The DTD I have used is the HTML 4.01 loose DTD with ARIA attributes added

A way I have developed to do this is by creating a bookmarklet that takes the innerHTML of a document (without the DOCTYPE) and adds the custom DOCTYPE to it and then sends it to the W3C validator: HTML4.01-loose+ARIA Checker (add as a favorite to try it out)

Editorial solutions have the advantage that they are technology-agnotisc