ARIA state
aria-busy
Says a region is still being updated, so wait before announcing it.
Set it to true and assistive technology holds off on the region until you set it back. That is the entire contract. It buys you a quiet window while you rebuild something, and it costs you the announcement if you forget to close the window.
Which roles may carry aria-busy
- Value
- true/false
- Filed as
- A state, which is how ARIA files it and not a rule about how often it changes.
- Roles that may carry it
- Any role. This one is global, which is why no individual role lists it.
Global means no role has to grant permission for it. There is one more place to check, because ARIA in HTML sets rules per element as well as per role, and it allows no aria-* attributes at all on a datalist or on the html element. Past that, the way a global attribute goes wrong is rarely where it sits. It is whether it is still true, which is the next section.
Every role above comes from the specification's own list for this attribute, checked name for name. The normative definition stays with the W3C, in the aria-busy section of the ARIA specification.
Keeping aria-busy true
Forgetting to set it back is the whole failure here, because true is a promise that you will finish later. There is one case the spec makes a requirement rather than a suggestion. If updating a widget would leave it missing the children its role requires, even for a moment, you have to mark it busy while that is true. A tab list mid-rebuild with no tabs in it is the shape that matters. So set it before you start, clear it when the last child lands, and clear it in the error path too, because a region left busy after a request fails simply stays silent from then on.
How aria-busy gets checked
There are test rules that check an ARIA attribute is one that exists, is allowed on the role underneath it, and carries a value of the right type. What they map to is ARIA's own author requirements rather than any WCAG criterion, so a misplaced attribute breaks ARIA without being a WCAG failure by itself. It becomes one under 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value the moment the missing or wrong value means the control's state cannot be worked out programmatically, which is what usually happens next.
Nothing automated catches the failure this page is about. A stale value is a valid value, on a permitted role, with the right type. It is only wrong about the world.
Attributes you will meet alongside aria-busy
- aria-atomic Whether an update should be read whole, or only the part that changed.
- aria-controls Points at what this control operates. A combobox has to say what it opens.
- aria-current Marks the one item in a set that represents the here and now, such as the current page in a nav.
- aria-describedby Points at further description, read after the name. Hints and error text usually go here.
- aria-details Points at richer explanation elsewhere in the page, which people can navigate to rather than have read out.
- aria-flowto Overrides reading order by pointing at what should be read next. Rarely the right answer.
- aria-hidden Removes an element from the accessibility tree while leaving it on screen.
- aria-keyshortcuts Lists the keyboard shortcuts that activate this control, so they can be announced and checked for clashes.
Every ARIA state and property · Every ARIA role · ARIA explained