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Are we live?

Scott O’Hara dives deep into ARIA live in this technical post, detailing all the different ways of implementing a live region that inform screen readers that something has updated:

1. You can use specific ARIA region roles: alert, log or status
2. You can use aria-live, with one of the following states: assertive, polite, off
3. You can use HTML’s native output element, which has an implicit ARIA role of status

A common use case is the ‘notification’ design pattern whereby a message appears at the top of the screen. Developers often inject this notification into the page on an as-needed basis, but this doesn’t work very well for screen readers other than VoiceOver. The best approach is to ensure an empty live region exists on the page from the beginning, and then inject notification text into it.

The ARIA working group are apparently reviewing and planning to make big updates to live regions in ARIA 1.4. This is still a way off, as ARIA 1.2 is still only a W3C Candidate Recommendation Draft.

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