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Re: Aria Alert and Progress Loaders

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Sep 10, 2020 7:11AM


On 10/09/2020 14:04, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
> Well, I used to think so too, but sometimes you need to mark up an
> important announcement on a page, one that gets aggressive visual
> treatment (imagine an emergency closure alert).
> You can do the right things, place it at the top of the page or the
> main content, mark it with an h1, but ultimately sometimes you want it
> announced. The alert role would work well in this scenario, and I
> think there is a role or attribute that should trigger announcement on
> page load (doing it by hacking delays and injection with Javascript is
> not super reliable).
> Then again I am maybe just temporarily being swayed by dealing with a
> specific practical problem.

I'm not saying that there's no use case for doing that. I'm saying that
per the spec, browser/AT combos should not be announcing it on page
load. The fact that some browsers/ATs currently do is a bug that you're
currently relying on. Either the spec should be changed, or a new
attribute should be spec'd, because if browsers fix their bugs, you'll
end up with no announcements on page load which is what the spec says.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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