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Thread: Multiple live regions
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From: Stein Erik Skotkjerra
Date: Wed, Sep 30 2015 9:00AM
Subject: Multiple live regions
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Hi, Birkir and Leonie,
Thank you for your comments. I should have given more context so the question would be clearer. I do agree with you that in general too many things happening at the same time is not optimal, but e.g. in complex web applications you can not always control these things, and the visual cues are handled in a way that makes sense and doesn't cause too much cognitive load, but on the screen reader side it gets a bit tricky. For instance, a chat message may arrive at the same time as some other alert to the user is triggered.
I have checked the ARIA specs and the UAG, but couldn't find anything specifically covering this - possibly a bit narrow - situation. I would expect that when the ARIA live region is to be polite it should queue up announcements, but this doesn't happen - at least not in any of the combinations of Screen readers and web browsers I have tested so far. The solution so far has been to detect these situations and generate a delay to ensure that no information is lost for screen reader users.
So my question was not so much if this is good or bad design, but if my expectations for behavior are in line with yours or not :)
Best regards,
Stein Erik
> 31. aug. 2015 kl. 12.20 skrev Birkir R. Gunnarsson < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >:
>
> Hi
> It is left up to the screen reader/browser how to handle this senario.
> There is no order of precedence I believe. The ARIA User Agent
> Implementation guide http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-implementation/
> does not specifically
> lay out the processing rules for this scenario.
>
> I would be a little worried about a webpage that triggers multiple
> live regions simultaneously. Would it be possible to change the design
> to minimize that?
>
>
>
> On 8/31/15, = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
>> Hi, all,
>> There seems to be a problem in several browser/screen reader combinations
>> when several live regions exist on the same page and they are triggered at
>> the same time. Wouldn't the expected behavior be to queue up the
>> announcements - especially if set to polite?
>>
>> All comments welcome,
>> Thanks in advance,
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Stein Erik Skotkjerra
>> >> >> >> >>
>
>
> --
> Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
> > > >
From: Léonie Watson
Date: Wed, Sep 30 2015 10:10AM
Subject: Re: Multiple live regions
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> From: WebAIM-Forum On Behalf Of Stein Erik Skotkjerra
> I have checked the ARIA specs and the UAG, but couldn't find anything
> specifically covering this - possibly a bit narrow - situation. I would expect that
> when the ARIA live region is to be polite it should queue up announcements,
> but this doesn't happen - at least not in any of the combinations of Screen
> readers and web browsers I have tested so far. The solution so far has been
> to detect these situations and generate a delay to ensure that no
> information is lost for screen reader users.
>
> So my question was not so much if this is good or bad design, but if my
> expectations for behavior are in line with yours or not :)
If two live regions update simultaneously, where one is assertive and the other polite, then the announcements should be queued. If the live regions are both the same priority, the announcements should not be queued.
The idea behind live regions is to cause a screen reader to stop what it's doing and announce the updated content. If what it is doing is announcing the first live region update, the second live region update will interrupt that. If two live regions with the same priority level update simultaneously, then factors like browser, script and screen reader performance will probably determine which of the updates succeeds.
Léonie.
--
Senior accessibility engineer @PacielloGroup @LeonieWatson