Why are my live regions not working?

Posted on Wednesday, 1 May 2024 by Patrick H. Lauke in Design and development

Live regions have a reputation for being "flaky" and inconsistent. While this can be attributed in part to shortcomings in current implementations, the problem can also be caused by developers misunderstanding how live regions are intended to work.

Currently, the exact behaviour of live regions is arguably not very well explained in the ARIA specification, nor the Core-AAM specification. As a result, support can vary across different browser/screen reader combinations. While efforts are underway to make the specifications clearer, and to harmonise the behaviour across implementations, there are approaches that developers can use that stand a much better chance of working than others.

In simple terms, when browsers encounter an element marked up as a live region (either explicitly with an aria-live="…" attribute, or with a role that has an implicit live region, such as role="status"), they expose this information to screen readers in the accessibility tree. Whenever the content of the live region changes, browsers send out events through the platform's accessibility API. Screen readers need to register for these events, and then announce them to the user.

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