WAI-ARIA: aria-live (Property)

Description

Indicates that an element will be updated, and describes the types of updates the user agents, assistive technologies, and user can expect from the live region.

The values of this attribute are expressed in degrees of importance. When regions are specified as polite, assistive technologies will notify users of updates but generally do not interrupt the current task, and updates take low priority. When regions are specified as assertive, assistive technologies will immediately notify the user, and could potentially clear the speech queue of previous updates.

Politeness levels are essentially an ordering mechanism for updates and serve as a strong suggestion to user agents or assistive technologies. The value may be overridden by user agents, assistive technologies, or the user. For example, if assistive technologies can determine that a change occurred in response to a key press or a mouse click, the assistive technologies may present that change immediately even if the value of the aria-live attribute states otherwise.

Since different users have different needs, it is up to the user to tweak his or her assistive technologies’ response to a live region with a certain politeness level from the commonly defined baseline. Assistive technologies may choose to implement increasing and decreasing levels of granularity so that the user can exercise control over queues and interruptions.

When the property is not set on an object that needs to send updates, the politeness level is the value of the nearest ancestor that sets the aria-live attribute.

The aria-live attribute is the primary determination for the order of presentation of changes to live regions. Implementations will also consider the default level of politeness in a role when the aria-live attribute is not set in the ancestor chain (e.g., log changes are polite by default). Items which are assertive will be presented immediately, followed by polite items. User agents or assistive technologies MAY choose to clear queued changes when an assertive change occurs. (e.g., changes in an assertive region may remove all currently queued changes)

When live regions are marked as polite, assistive technologies SHOULD announce updates at the next graceful opportunity, such as at the end of speaking the current sentence or when the user pauses typing. When live regions are marked as assertive, assistive technologies SHOULD notify the user immediately. Because an interruption may disorient users or cause them to not complete their current task, authors SHOULD NOT use the assertive value unless the interruption is imperative.

Browser Compatibility

Screen Reader Support

aria-live Example

HTML Example

<div aria-live="true">
  <span>GOOG: $400</span>
</div>

Characteristics

Used in Roles

• All elements of the base markup

Value

• Token:
  One of a limited set of allowed values. An explicit value of undefined for this type is the equivalent of providing no value.
• Assertive:
  Indicates that updates to the region have the highest priority and should be presented the user immediately.
• Off (default)
  • Indicates that updates to the region should not be presented to the user unless the used is currently focused on that region.
• Polite
  • Indicates that updates to the region should be presented at the next graceful opportunity, such as at the end of speaking the current sentence or when the user pauses typing.

Semantic HTML

No HTML element equivalent.

Reference

• WAI-ARIA 1.2 Specification
  Refer to the notes from the WAI-ARIA 1.2 specification for more information on aria-live.
• A11Y Support
  The screenreader compatibility for each of the ARIA attributes is taken from the A11Y Support. Please refer to the original source if screenreader compatibility is updated for aria-live.
• MDN Web Docs
  The browser compatibility for each of the ARIA attributes is taken from the MDN Web Docs. Please refer to the original source if browser compatibility is updated for aria-live.