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Re: ARIA Polite VS Assertive

for

From: Jim Homme
Date: Apr 13, 2022 9:38AM

Hi,
Looking for a starting point to see the differences between how screen readers handle this, then possibly adjusting.

Thanks.

Jim

=========Jim Homme
Senior Digital Accessibility Consultant
Bender Consulting Services
412-787-8567
https://www.benderconsult.com/
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of glen walker
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2022 11:17 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] ARIA Polite VS Assertive

Yes, it certainly depends. On a "characters left" message, I never update the live region on every character typed just like I don't update a countdown timer on every second (assuming there is more than 10 seconds left). It's really not much dev effort to get a nice effect. I usually have two regions. One is visible and not live and is updated on every keystroke or countdown timer second. The other is visually hidden
(sr-only) and is live (polite) and is updated periodically, such as after every 50 keystrokes (if the characters left is a large number) or after every minute (if there are several minutes left).

I then adjust the live updates as you get towards the end. With keystrokes, if you're below 10 chars left, I'll update the live on every keystroke. If there's a timer, then I'll update perhaps every 10 seconds when it's under a minute left and maybe every second when there's 10 seconds left, or something like that. Is there a potential to hear 10,9,8,7... blasted at once? Maybe, but the advantages of everything else working great outweigh the possibility of the one bad situation, in my opinion.

But as I mentioned before, that's just my personal preference. There are certainly other creative ways of handling this.