Limitations of aria-live as defined (Comment 337)

Document: Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0 Last Call Working Draft 16 September 2010
Part: aria-live (property) (aria-live)

There is no way to specify queuing policy. Polite notifications always queue, assertive notifications always flush. This means you can't implement the case where you have a series of polite notifications, pause those notifications, speak an assertive notification, then go back to the polite notifications. A good example of where this would be needed is a chat room web app. In the main chat room, the messages in the log are polite. However, if someone sends you a direct message, you would want that to pause the notifications in the main chat, speak the direct message with a different voice, then resume speaking the notifications in the main chat. Right now, if the direct message were polite, it would be at the end of the queue, and if it were assertive, it would clobber all the messages in the main chat.


Proposal:

Bring back the "rude" value.

off - not live (no change)
polite - speaks if nothing else is speaking, queues at the end (no change)
assertive - skips the queue and goes to the front, but does not flush
rude - flushes the queue and goes to the front




-Charles and T.V. Raman

Received on Tuesday, 5 October 2010 18:52:08 UTC