Meta: Accessiblity Enhancements (ARIA)

[nschonni]

Accessiblity enhancements

• Add aria-required for required elements Feature request: aria-required="true" when a field is required #230
• Using aria-invalid="true" for form elements that have an error.
• aria-live attribute for error message section Meta: Accessiblity Enhancements (ARIA) #706 (comment)

These might be masked under an accessible/aria option (I know you don't like adding more to the API) or as an optional extend method.

/cc @pjackson28

[pjackson28]

Another suggestion is to append an empty div with aria-live="polite" and aria-relevant="all". This would be used to provide relevant updates to screen readers (that support aria-live) by replacing the contents of the div. An example usage is here: http://wet-boew.github.com/wet-boew/demos/formvalid/formvalid-eng.html

In the referenced example, when an inline error message is updated, the same update is made to the div element, but only if there is a change in the message. The problem with applying the aria-live to the existing inline error messages is that an update was being sent to screen readers on every keystroke, even if there was no change in message. This avoids that by checking first if there is an actual change (rather than just a refresh) before triggering an update.

[jzaefferer]

I think both are fine to just add without any options.

[staabm]

@jzaefferer fyi: I just ticked the 2nd box regarding aria-invalid, because this was added as a part of #796

[jzaefferer]

Nice, thanks.

[Nettsentrisk]

According to the latest recommendations, aria-required and aria-invalid should not be used on elements which already have the required attribute or which are invalid according to constraints: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-aria/#docconformance

For aria-invalid it says: "Only use the aria-invalid attribute for elements that are not allowed to have a readonly attribute in HTML5".

An aria-live should only be used on an error summary, not for individual error messages that are already associated via aria-describedby.