A small but very practical use of ARIA alerts

[Victor Tsaran]

Hi,
I know this is not a "bomb" but I wanted to share this with the group
anyway. I find these uses of ARIA very practical though on a small scale.
In the new classic Mail we have a feature where the message you are
composing is saved every 3 minutes into the "drafts" folder. The users
are notified of this by means of a modeless alert box.
We solved the problem for screen reader users by simply having inserted
an ARIA role of "alert" every time the message pops up on the screen.

The screen reader now says:
"Message last saved on [date]".
Simple, useful and works with FF3.

Best,
Victor

[Aaron Leventhal]

Yes, alert works for now. Eventually I hope we can do these things with
<div role="status" aria-live="polite">Messages saved</div>

- Aaron

[Aaron Leventhal]

Aaron Leventhal wrote:
> Yes, alert works for now. Eventually I hope we can do these things with
> <div role="status" aria-live="polite">Messages saved</div>

To clarify ... if the content is something that suddenly shows up and
then disappears, it's an alert. That works pretty well across screen
readers with Firefox now.

If it's a semi-permanent panel that has content which occasionally
changes inside of it, that's a live region, and it may specifically be a
status. Those work only in Orca and Fire Vox right now.

- Aaron

[Victor Tsaran]

Yes, this is an alert. Again, the reason I mentioned the word
"practical" is that, forgive me, but until screen readers support live
regions, we are forced to use less elegant solutions. Although, again,
alerts serve their purpose in this case.
V

[Aaron Leventhal]

Victor Tsaran wrote:
> ... "practical" ...

Yep, there is definitely a need for practical WAI-ARIA info. Thank you
for helping with that. We need to do a good job of describing what works
now and what is up-and-coming.

I've been trying to keep track of that in the ARIA role and state tables
here (by version of Firefox and screen reader):
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/ARIA:_Accessible_Rich_Internet_Applications

- Aaron

[Victor Tsaran]

Hi Aaron,
I think we need to reorganize this page because in its current state it
may be totally confusing to newcommers to ARIA land.
Here are some of the issues:
1. The page refers to ARIA as being supported in Firefox 1.5, 2.0 and
3.0 in different places. We either have to remove old information into
"history" section or something like that or take it out from the page
altogether.
2. The page refers to "Accessibility Extension" as the testing tool for
ARIA roles and states, but the extension itself is not compatible with
FF 3.0 (at least this is the message I got when I tried installing the
beta version).
Last but not least, the page is just getting too big.
What do you think?

Regards,
Victor

[Marco Zehe]

Hi Aaron,

Aaron Leventhal wrote:
> If it's a semi-permanent panel that has content which occasionally
> changes inside of it, that's a live region, and it may specifically be a
> status. Those work only in Orca and Fire Vox right now.

Little correction: NVDA's later versions from source code or daily
snapshot builds also have basic live region support. Different
politeness levels are not yet handled in different manners AFAIK, but
automatically speaking any properly marked up live region content is
supported.

Jamie and Mick can certainly jump in with more details.

Marco

[Aaron Leventhal]

Yes, it makes sense. Thanks for the feedback.

I think we should take these suggestions as the content gets migrated
over to codetalks.org eventually. That's a community driven portal that
David Bolter started, but it hasn't received much content yet :/ We're
planning to take some from what we've written at devmo.

The big thing we probably need most is tutorials for each kind of
widget, all referred to from central resource like codetalks.org.

- Aaron