RE: Seeking spec clarification: repeated text in the same live region

Hi, Aaron,

After thinking about this for a while I’ve come down on the side of recommending that Chrome behave like Firefox and if the live region is explicitly rewritten, then the LiveRegion event should be sent again.
It might be nice to have a minim amount of time that needs to pass before refiring the same thing in order to keep screen reader users from being flooded with messages that are sent in rapid succession.

My concern is that there’s the potential for live regions to be frequently rewritten  for reasons having nothing to do with accessibility and that screen reader users would be overwhelmed by the same thing repeatedly.
But this is something that a screen reader can filter out.
If you fail to inform of the rewrites there’s no way to infer them. So notifying seems to me to be the best approach.

--Glen

Glen Gordon
VFO | Vice President & Chief Technology Officer
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From: Aaron Leventhal [mailto:aleventhal@google.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 11:45 AM
To: ARIA Working Group <public-aria@w3.org>
Subject: Seeking spec clarification: repeated text in the same live region

I'm seeing different behaviors in different implementations, when I set the innerText of a live region to the same text it was before.
- Firefox: the text repeats. I remember coding it to repeat on purpose back when I worked on Firefox accessibility.
- Safari and Chrome: the text does not repeat

What is the correct behavior?

Here's my use case for repeating the text. Imagine an alert. The alert might say something like "This passwords do not match" or something else as a response to validation of user input. Every time the alert is updated, there is a visual animation showing something new happened. However, just because the text happens to be the same as what it was 5 seconds ago, this time it is not spoken. This may be a contrived example.

Looking for feedback!

Thanks,
Aaron