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Re: Marking up a countdown timer

for

From: glen walker
Date: Sep 8, 2020 4:23PM

I wouldn't rule out aria-live, just don't put it on the time element
itself. You don't want to hear that announced every second.

But you can have a secondary hidden element with aria-live that you update
every 30 seconds (or some timespan) and it would announce when updated. It
depends how long the timer is. For something like 5 minutes, I would
probably update the secondary element every minute for the first four
minutes. Then when it gets to 1 min, update it every 10 or 15 seconds.
When it gets under 10 seconds, update every second.

You'd have to work out the timespans and do some usability testing to get
it right.

If the displayed timer were in a landmark (region or complementary), then
it would also be easy to navigate to with a screen reader so the user could
check it whenever they want.