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ARIA Notify API

Category
DOM
Type
New or changed feature
Status
In development (Chrome In development)
Intent stage
Start prototyping

Summary

ariaNotify provides a JavaScript API that enables content authors to directly tell a screen reader what to read. ariaNotify improves reliability and developer control compared to ARIA live regions, allowing for announcing changes not tied to DOM updates. This enables more consistent and ergonomic accessibility experiences across dynamic web applications. Iframe usage of this feature can be controlled via a permission policy "aria-notify".

Motivation

Currently the only mechanism available today that communicates content changes in a web app down to the accessibility layer is via ARIA live regions. One major limitation to ARIA live regions is that they assume the change to a webpage is tied to a DOM element. This leads to content authors employing various inefficient or inconsistent tricks and hacks to notify of changes that are not associated with the DOM. We propose a separate notification API to address these scenarios, called `ariaNotify`.

Standards & signals

Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tFT-4_sDvgnZoS8AYEcQquXzqAYaoB53DBH0C2T5rMk

Explainers: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/Accessibility/AriaNotify/explainer.md

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