RE: Question on TITLE element and LIVE regions

I see your point, it doesn't look like this works as being supported by screen readers at the moment though, so no feedback is conveyed even if the title text changes. I can file a bug against this. I've tried this in JAWS, but cannot test using NVDA at the moment, so confirmation would be appreciated.

-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Scheuhammer [mailto:clown@alum.mit.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:14 PM
To: Bryan Garaventa; Gunderson, Jon R; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: Re: Question on TITLE element and LIVE regions

Hi Bryan,

Bryan wrote:
> It doesn't appear so. I've attached a test file to demonstrate this, and there is no evidence of the title element in the accessibility tree.

Right, the title element is not mapped to an accessible object in the accessibility tree.  But, its contents are used as the accessible name of the document object.  I inspected the document accessible object on Windows and GNOME/Linux running FF, and the accessible name changes as your script runs.

MSAA and ATK/AT-SPI both provide an accessible name-changed event, namely EVENT_OBJECT_NAMECHANGE [1] and "object:property-change:accessible-name" respectively.  FF supports these events.  That is, as the title content changes, the accessible name changes, and FF fires an accessibility event to notify any interested parties.

That there is a name-changed event means that aria-live is unnecessary* here.  I modified your test file, removing the aria-live attribute from the <title> element, and ran it with FF on Linux.  The inspector tool shows the name-change event for every change in title contents.

* aria-live is unnecessary as far as FF/MSAA and FF/AT-SPI are concerned.  I haven't looked at other accessibility APIs, nor other browsers, however.

[1]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd318066%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

--
;;;;joseph.

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            - G. Bernhardt -

Received on Wednesday, 24 September 2014 20:31:21 UTC