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Re: If you use the WAI-ARIA role “application”, please do so wisely!

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From: James Nurthen
Date: Feb 6, 2012 3:27PM

What we really need then - instead of application mode is a method where
the web application can signal to the screen reader that it has finished
modifying the page - so the screen reader can refresh whatever buffers they
may have.

I thought setting aria-busy to true while making changes, and then
resetting it to false once done was the right way to do this although I
have never run any tests to see if this actually works in commonly
available AT.

Has anyone tested this - or can any screen reader developers chime in as to
how we should be signaling as a web developer that we have finished
modifying the page?


Regards,
James

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 13:06, Ryan Hemphill < <EMAIL REMOVED> >wrote:

> This is a tricky one, I agree.
>
> There is more to this, however. One of the problems that you can run into
> when using rich internet applications is a 'loss of synch' between the
> browser and screen reader (usually JAWS) and application mode avoids these
> kinds of hiccups. One of the places I see this being a real problem is
> when rich internet applications leverahe AJAX or xml-xslt transforms which
> can sometimes build in such a way that the screen reader gets the wrong
> information. From what I have been able to gather, much of this comes from
> the fact that the content is being passed to the screen reader before it is
> displayed. While some people may think this isn't the case, I have seen
> some pretty extreme examples of where content is being read off before it
> ever gets displayed on the screen at all - sometimes 15 seconds.
>
> Anyway, I would say that the more sophisticated your application, the more
> likely that you are going to need to use - and understand - application
> mode.
>
> - Ryan
>
> On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Kevin Chao < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> > Marco Zehe, Hamburg, Germany, Mozilla a11y QA.
> > wrote up this great, informative, and practical: New blog post: If you
> > use the WAI-ARIA role "application", do so wisely!
> >
> >
> http://www.marcozehe.de/2012/02/06/if-you-use-the-wai-aria-role-application-please-do-so-wisely/
> > #a11y #aria #axs
> >
> > Kevin
> >