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Re: ARIA Polite VS Assertive

for

From: glen walker
Date: Apr 13, 2022 8:34AM

I rarely use assertive and use role=alert even less than that. Unless the
house is on fire, I just don't find that there are many messages that are
so important that the screen reader needs to be interrupted to announce an
update.

For example, in a chat interface, if I'm in a conversation and I'm typing a
response and listening to what I'm typing and then the other person sends a
response, I don't want my train of thought interrupted by hearing what they
typed in the middle of what I'm typing. I'm ok hearing their response when
I pause my typing. Now, one might argue that the other person's response
might affect what I'm typing. That's true but to me does not justify
interrupting what I was doing. But this is all just my personal preference.

You also have to consider that assertive regions might clear any pending
messages. The aria-live spec says, "User agents or assistive technologies
MAY choose to clear queued changes when an assertive change occurs." I'm
not sure which screen readers actually do that or if there are heuristics
or other factors that might cause it to happen. That is, JAWS or NVDA or
Voiceover or whatever might clear a pending polite announcement if an
assertive message came through in one situation but might not clear it in
another situation. To me it's too undefined on when that might happen and
goes back to whether messages are important enough to interrupt what is
happening.


On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 8:15 AM Jim Homme < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hi,
> I need to support a chat system and it needs to work for all screen
> readers. Does anyone know the differences between how JAWS handles ARIA
> assertive and polite messages VS how JAWS handles them? The same goes for
> Narrator, VoiceOver, and TalkBack. And are there differences among browser
> combinations?
>
> Thanks for any and all help.
>
> Jim
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jim
>
>
> =========> Jim Homme
> Senior Digital Accessibility Consultant
> Bender Consulting Services
> 412-787-8567
> https://www.benderconsult.com/
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