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Re: Page loading announcement to screen reader user

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From: Jeremy Echols
Date: Sep 26, 2023 7:40AM

If you're creating a single-page app, the information below is irrelevant and you should ignore me :)

But if you're talking about a traditional website, where the entire page is being requested from the server, there may not be any techniques that will get what you want here. If the form submission takes a long time to process, there may not be a title or body until after that occurs.

In a case like this, it is probably good to have some messaging on the form to let everybody know that the form submission can take some time. You could also have an intermediate page with a very minimal "processing your submission" message. This approach takes some server-side work that will depend on your approach and the backend technology in use, but it gives everybody a nice page that lets them know the form processor is slow, but it is working.

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Sudheer Babu
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2023 03:50
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] Page loading announcement to screen reader user

Hello All,

We have a use case where the page reloads on a submission and takes time to load the page.
When the browser is still taking time to load, is there a way we can communicate the status to the screen reader users.

We tried updating the page title when the page is loading and used aria-live regions and role alerts, but JAWS/NVDA is not picking up anything related to that.

Do we have any working examples that we can refer to and compare the behaviours of?

Also, on the other hand I feel that screen readers should automatically pick up the status of the browser loading and communicate that to the user.
I see VoiceOver announces as web busy when the page is still loading but not JAWS/NVDA.


Thanks in advance!
Sudheer