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GOV.UK fixes a noisy screenreader issue
GOV.UK had discovered that in recent versions of screen readers, its contact form was too aggressive in announcing how many characters were remaining. This was despite the existing markup of aria-live="polite".
I’ve been keeping an eye on the GitHub issue for this, and a fix was merged recently. There are now three elements responsible for character count announcements:
- A static element: “You can use up to 200 characters”. This is visible for non-JavaScript users, and visually hidden otherwise.
- An injected, live-updating element showing the characters remaining. This has
aria-hidden="true"to hide itself from screen readers. - An injected, debounced element showing characters remaining, visually hidden and
aria-live="polite". It only updates after 1 second of inactivity, and only announces once the user has passed the threshold (if a threshold has been set).
This looked like quite a thorny issue to resolve – well done to the Design System team for getting it updated! I hope to see an official blog post on it soon 🤞
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