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Re: Am I understanding aria-relevant="removals" correctly?

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: May 28, 2015 4:48PM

It's important to understand the events being triggered by the browser, as well as compatibility issues that you will encounter during testing.

Firstly, the attributes described including an explanation of each with some additional code samples can be found at
http://whatsock.com/training/#hd25

The specific demo of aria-relevant that works in Firefox + JAWS within the above referenced section, is at
http://whatsock.com/training/demos/lr/aria-live-polite-removals.html
(Confirmed using JAWS16 + Firefox on Win7)

This works because the text events fired by Firefox reflect the DOM node that is removed, which is then passed to the AT (JAWS16 in this case), so that the removed text of that node is subsequently announced.

This is the opposite of the text event that is fired when a DOM node is added, which is how aria-live="polite" by itself works, so that the newly added text node is passed to the screen reader and announced.

This removal feedback doesn't work in IE11, because live regions using JAWS16 are mostly broken in IE+JAWS16, and the correct events may not be firing properly in IE in any case.

The following LinkedIn article explains a bit of news regarding this and how it may impact future support levels in IE in the future:
https://www.linkedin.com/grp/post/4512178-6009113313206616068

It doesn't appear that NVDA supports aria-relevant correctly in this case either at present, since nothing is announced when the DOM node is removed.