WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: WCAG 2.0 AA success criteria for live chat

for

From: Laura Fathauer
Date: Sep 24, 2020 6:47AM


WCAG 2.1 added 4.1.3 Status Messages that discusses specifically screen
reader text, but this wouldn't necessary fall in the category of a "status
message" like an error or an alert would. The extended description of 4.1.3
does include this note: " Live regions and alerts can be usefully applied
in many situations where a change of content takes place which does not
constitute a status message, as defined in this Success Criterion. However,
there is a risk of making an application too "chatty" for a screen reader
user."

In their aria-live region they should only be doing "additions". It may be
due to their programming that the entire region is being interpreted as an
"addition", but that would be something to debug in their javascript and
web coding.

Aria-relevant values
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Techniques/Using_the_aria-relevant_attribute>

.Laura


On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 9:12 PM cb < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> I think this is my first "what criterion do I fail this under" question!
>
> Many websites have chat features where you activate a button to open a
> non-modal chat window that floats in the corner of the page. You type your
> questions into a text field, and see responses from the agent in the same
> window. I've seen a bunch of these lately, and some of them repeat the
> entire conversation from the beginning any time a screenreader user types a
> new message or an agent sends a reply. This makes it unusable for
> screenreader users, it's impossible to pick out the new messages from the
> endless repetitions. I'm looking for WCAG 2.0 AA criteria that would apply
> to this situation, though I'd also be interested to hear if WCAG 2.1 or
> beyond has added anything relevant.
>
> Thanks
>
> Caroline
> > > > >