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Re: Search result notifications - Screen readers

for

From: Peter Weil
Date: Feb 21, 2022 6:20AM

Just to add something to the discussion: if you do an autocomplete (combobox) along the lines suggested/recommended in ARIA 1.2 (List autocomplete with manual selection) plus the aria-active-descendant attribute, the first item will be selected and announced as ”item n of [total]". This gives you an announcement of the total number of results without a live region (thus possibly avoiding a lot of extra noise). I'm not saying that you must avoid a live region, but maybe you don't need it? Or at least you might want to consider limiting the announcements so they aren't too noisy as a person types. Determining where the line between helpful and annoying probably comes down to user testing, if you can do that. The chief exception is when there are no results; in this case a live region announcing “no matches” (or similar) seems more important.

In the case of filtering content with a search, I recommend Scott O'Hara's recent article, "Considering dynamic search results and content”.

https://www.scottohara.me/blog/2022/02/05/dynamic-results.html



On Feb 21, 2022, at 3:12 AM, Mark Magennis < <EMAIL REMOVED> <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> >> wrote:

You mentioned suggestions there Don. That sounds like an autocomplete search field that pops up a listbox containing suggested searches that match your input. The number of suggestions changes as you type and although there is no visible message saying how many it contains, it is visually apparent and it is informative so it makes sense to use a live region to give a feedback message such as "10 suggestions". When the number of matches changes, the message will automatically be read again - "8 suggestions", "3 suggestions", etc.