- From: Terrill Thompson <tft@u.washington.edu>
- Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:12:38 -0700
- To: PFWG Public Comments <public-pfwg-comments@w3.org>
Re. Comment 325: Popups - live regions Thanks for adding live regions to the glossary. I accept this response. tt -----Original Message----- From: Janina Sajka [mailto:janina@a11y.org] Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010 11:30 AM To: Terrill Thompson Cc: PFWG Public Comments Subject: Response to your comments on WAI-ARIA 1.0 Authoring Practices Comment 325: Popups - live regions Date: 2010-03-23 Archived at: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-pfwg-comments/2010JanMar/0045.html Relates to: WAI-ARIA 1.0 Authoring Practices - 5.2. Implementing Live Regions <http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-wai-aria-practices-20091215/#LiveRegions> Status: Alternate action taken ------------- Your comment: ------------- What exactly is a live region? The term is used repeatedly throughout the ARIA spec, but nowhere do I see it actually defined within the spec. The only definition I could find outside the spec is in section 5.2 of WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.0: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/#LiveRegions There, it is said that "Live regions are part of a Web page that the author expects to change". The phrase "Live Regions" in that definition is a link to the ARIA spec, to an id that doesn't seem to exist: http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/#liveregions Given this limited definition, I wonder whether the popup div in my popup use case might be a live region, and therefore all live region properties, including aria-live="assertive", would apply, and would result in the desired effect as describe at the top of this message. If a popup div is not a live region, why not? What criteria does it fail to meet? -------------------------------- Response from the Working Group: -------------------------------- We have added a glossary definition for live region that is now referenced throughout the specification. A pop-up is the direct result of a user action and should not be marked as a live region. Popup's will be spoken automatically provided that you have an element within it that has focus. Here is our glossary definition of a "live region": Live regions are perceivable regions of a web page that are updated as a result of an external event from areas of the page which have user focus. These regions are not generally regions of the page that are updated as result of a user interaction. This practices has become common place with the growing use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJax). Examples of live regions are chat logs or a sport scoring section that updates periodically to reflect game statistics. Since these asynchronous areas may update outside the user's area of focus, assistive technologies such as screen readers have either been unaware of their existence or how to process them for the user. WAI-ARIA has provided a collection of properties that allow the author to identify these live regions and how to process them: aria-live, aria-relevant, aria-atomic, and aria-busy. WAI-ARIA has a collection of pre-defined roles that are forms of live regions. As for your pop-up use case we need more information. It could be a tooltip, a dialog, or a menu or perhaps not a pop-up at all. The aria specification is clear in that aria-popup only refs to menus as it maps directly to an accessibility API intended for this purpose. Please provide more information.
Received on Friday, 23 July 2010 18:16:35 UTC