RE: Question about animated images and ARIA

Joseph,

I'm going to experiment with all three of them using latest Jaws and IE8/FF3.5.
Thanks for the input.

- Stefan


-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Scheuhammer [mailto:clown@utoronto.ca] 
Sent: Mittwoch, 14. Oktober 2009 18:58
To: Jon Gunderson
Cc: Schnabel, Stefan; Steven Faulkner; wai-xtech@w3.org
Subject: Re: Question about animated images and ARIA

It could either be an alert [1], or a status indicator [2], or a 
progressbar [3], although I have misgivings for alert.

Alert is an "assertive" live region, and that may not apply to this 
situation.  I can't tell from your description.  Status, a "polite" live 
region, is another possibility.

Even so, an alert generally appears as a one-time event.  The situation 
you describe has a duration, and should involve "aria-busy" [4].  You 
could use an alert at the end of the loading operation to signal to the 
user that it has completed.

Progressbar, another "polite" live region that supports "aria-busy", is 
the best choice:
- "An element that displays the progress status for tasks that take a 
long time."
- "If the progressbar is describing the loading progress of a particular 
region of a page, ... set the aria-busy attribute to true on the region 
until it is finished loading."

Also, a progressbar can be indeterminate, and that seems to apply 
here.   Visually, indeterminate progressbars can be rendered in any 
number of ways including a bar with an animated stripe ("barber pole"), 
a spinning beach ball, a watch, an hour glass, and so on.  That sounds 
like what you describe, i.e., "an animated gif".

[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/#alert
[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/#status
[3] http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/#progressbar
[4] http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/#aria-busy

-- 
;;;;joseph

'What did one snowman say to the other snowman?'
             - "Adrift", D. Hume -

Received on Thursday, 15 October 2009 07:18:45 UTC