RE: Use cases for aria-relevant?

Hi,
Actually there is a very simple reason why aria-relevant doesn’t work reliably across browsers, which I remember bringing up here in the past but didn’t hear anything back.

According to the spec, browsers don’t apparently have to do anything with this attribute.

“aria-relevant is an optional attribute of live regions. This is a suggestion to assistive technologies, but assistive technologies are not required to present changes of all the relevant types.”
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#aria-relevant


I mentioned this in the past, saying that nobody can ever expect this attribute to do anything useful if it’s not even necessary for browsers to pay attention to in the first place.


Bryan Garaventa
Accessibility Fellow
Level Access, Inc.
Bryan.Garaventa@LevelAccess.com
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com

From: Aaron Leventhal <aleventhal@google.com>
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2018 1:52 PM
To: ARIA Working Group <public-aria@w3.org>
Subject: Use cases for aria-relevant?

Does anyone know of any examples of aria-relevant being used in a helpful way in shipping software?

I have concerns about this attribute. The PFWG originally added it to ARIA because theoretically a screen reader should be informed about any changes and be able to receive hints on whether those changes are useful. What happens when a user leaves a chatroom and their name is removed from a sidebar list? It seemed bad to develop a standard where it wasn't even possible to have removals of content be presented.

The default, aria-relevant="additions text" is to speak content being added and text changes. This is by far the most useful value, and I'm not sure any other value has ever been used in real life in a successful way.

For any other value to be useful, we'd need to know that AT/Browser combinations have been tested and provide a useful experience. For example, is a user informed that the element was removed? Or will the screen reader just read the element the same way it would have if the element was added?

I'm pretty skeptical of the real-world value of this attribute and wonder if it's causing more harm than good, as authors may not understand what it does, and implementations may not all treat it the same way. (For example, Mac Chrome and Safari are not treating aria-relevant="text" exactly the same for live changes that insert an entire text node).

Right now, it's almost certain that if an author used this attribute it was because they were confused by its purpose and maybe thought it was a helpful bandaid for fixing a bug, and it probably wasn't.

Thoughts?
Aaron