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Re: WCAG 2.0 AA success criteria for live chat

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Sep 24, 2020 7:13AM

I believe there may have been some recent assistive technology/browser bugs that were causing chat interfaces that should have functioned correctly to speak too much information. Since the default for aria-relevant is "additions text" I suspect this may be causing some of these previously accessible chats to become usable.

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Laura Fathauer
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2020 8:48 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] WCAG 2.0 AA success criteria for live chat

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WCAG 2.1 added 4.1.3 Status Messages that discusses specifically screen reader text, but this wouldn't necessary fall in the category of a "status message" like an error or an alert would. The extended description of 4.1.3 does include this note: " Live regions and alerts can be usefully applied in many situations where a change of content takes place which does not constitute a status message, as defined in this Success Criterion. However, there is a risk of making an application too "chatty" for a screen reader user."

In their aria-live region they should only be doing "additions". It may be due to their programming that the entire region is being interpreted as an "addition", but that would be something to debug in their javascript and web coding.

Aria-relevant values
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Techniques/Using_the_aria-relevant_attribute>

.Laura


On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 9:12 PM cb < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> I think this is my first "what criterion do I fail this under" question!
>
> Many websites have chat features where you activate a button to open a
> non-modal chat window that floats in the corner of the page. You type
> your questions into a text field, and see responses from the agent in
> the same window. I've seen a bunch of these lately, and some of them
> repeat the entire conversation from the beginning any time a
> screenreader user types a new message or an agent sends a reply. This
> makes it unusable for screenreader users, it's impossible to pick out
> the new messages from the endless repetitions. I'm looking for WCAG
> 2.0 AA criteria that would apply to this situation, though I'd also be
> interested to hear if WCAG 2.1 or beyond has added anything relevant.
>
> Thanks
>
> Caroline
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> >