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Multiple live regions

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From: Stein Erik Skotkjerra
Date: Sep 30, 2015 9:00AM

Hi, Birkir and Leonie,
Thank you for your comments. I should have given more context so the question would be clearer. I do agree with you that in general too many things happening at the same time is not optimal, but e.g. in complex web applications you can not always control these things, and the visual cues are handled in a way that makes sense and doesn't cause too much cognitive load, but on the screen reader side it gets a bit tricky. For instance, a chat message may arrive at the same time as some other alert to the user is triggered.

I have checked the ARIA specs and the UAG, but couldn't find anything specifically covering this - possibly a bit narrow - situation. I would expect that when the ARIA live region is to be polite it should queue up announcements, but this doesn't happen - at least not in any of the combinations of Screen readers and web browsers I have tested so far. The solution so far has been to detect these situations and generate a delay to ensure that no information is lost for screen reader users.

So my question was not so much if this is good or bad design, but if my expectations for behavior are in line with yours or not :)

Best regards,
Stein Erik


> 31. aug. 2015 kl. 12.20 skrev Birkir R. Gunnarsson < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:
>
> Hi
> It is left up to the screen reader/browser how to handle this senario.
> There is no order of precedence I believe. The ARIA User Agent
> Implementation guide http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-implementation/
> does not specifically
> lay out the processing rules for this scenario.
>
> I would be a little worried about a webpage that triggers multiple
> live regions simultaneously. Would it be possible to change the design
> to minimize that?
>
>
>
> On 8/31/15, <EMAIL REMOVED> < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> Hi, all,
>> There seems to be a problem in several browser/screen reader combinations
>> when several live regions exist on the same page and they are triggered at
>> the same time. Wouldn't the expected behavior be to queue up the
>> announcements - especially if set to polite?
>>
>> All comments welcome,
>> Thanks in advance,
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Stein Erik Skotkjerra
>> >> >> >> >>
>
>
> --
> Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
> > > >