The Many Lives of a Notification
taught by: Sarah Higley
Session Summary
Learn when and how to craft live regions that enhance screen reader experience rather than detracting from it, with practical examples and real user feedback.
Description
Live regions are one of the most powerful tools for improving screen reader accessibility in web applications. Still, when used incorrectly, they can turn an otherwise good experience into a completely unusable mess. They are fragile and full of undocumented nuances and gotchas, intimidating for the initiated and frustrating for those who regularly deal with them.
How do you make toast notifications work for people using screen magnification software? Why does this one error message stubbornly refuse to work with VoiceOver, even though it's fine with NVDA? How can you tell if you made a mistake, or the browser or screen reader did?
We’ll examine when and why to use or not use notifications, how to build robust live region implementations, and how to debug them. We’ll also review some specific examples, including form errors, loading updates, and announcements in a simple chat application.
Practical Skills
- Live regions, when used incorrectly, can make a website or app unusable with a screen reader.
- Live regions are inherently unreliable, and using them is an exercise in managing that unreliability.
- Live regions are not a replacement for using semantic states and focus changes.