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Re: ARIA Polite VS Assertive

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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Apr 13, 2022 8:53AM

That's funny, I very rarely use polite. I guess it depends on how you judge the importance. But one issue with polite that you should be aware of is that it may queue messages and read them all at once when it gets a chance. This can be a disaster. For example, if you have a "remaining characters" count for a text input field. Putting the number in an assertive live region usually works quite well because it starts of with "remaining characters: 250" and as the user types, every now and then when they pause it says "243", "227", etc. But if you use aria-live="polite" it may wait until the user pauses and then blurt out "249 248 247 246 ...". Can be a pain. It depends on how fast the user types, how long they pause, etc. but usually an assertive region works best. Probably better still is scripting to only read out at intervals, say 250, 200, 150, 100, 50, 20, 10, 5, 1 but that's more dev effort.

So what's best often depends a lot on the nature of the task, e.g. chat vs. remaining character count

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of glen walker
Sent: 13 April 2022 15:34
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [WebAIM] ARIA Polite VS Assertive

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/
> Support the dreams of independence through employment for students
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