live role
role="marquee"
Content that scrolls, cycles or rotates on its own.
What role="marquee" means, and when to use it
Use marquee for content that cycles on its own, like a rotating set of headlines. Before you do, check whether the thing should be cycling at all, since content that moves without being asked causes trouble for more people than it helps.
The HTML element behind role="marquee"
The old marquee element is obsolete in HTML and is not this role.
What role="marquee" obliges you to do
- It has to have an accessible name. ARIA marks this one of the 34 roles that require a name, so without one a screen reader announces the role and stops. Its own text will not become the name here, so it has to come from aria-labelledby or aria-label.
Live region roles announce changes nobody navigated to
A live region tells assistive technology to announce a change the user never went looking for. A validation error, a save confirmation, a count going up.
The container has to be in the page before the message arrives in it. Build the region and its text in the same step and the browser has nothing to compare against, so there is no change to detect and nothing is announced. Two of these roles also arrive with settings already applied. status is polite and atomic, and log is polite.
That timing mistake is invisible to a scanner, which sees a correctly built live region and reports no problem. It only shows up when somebody triggers the update for real with a screen reader running.
Where role="marquee" sits in the model
- The name can come from
- aria-labelledby or aria-label. Its own text does not become the name, so text inside it will not be read as one.
The normative definition stays with the W3C, so it cannot go stale here. marquee in the ARIA specification.
How a checker tests role="marquee"
Getting this one wrong is easy to assume is a 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value problem, and mostly it is not. These are the published test rules that apply.
The other live roles
- alert An urgent message that screen readers announce the moment it appears.
- log A running record where new entries pile up, like a chat history or an activity feed.
- status A message worth announcing that is not urgent enough to interrupt what somebody is doing.
- timer A counter that updates as time passes.
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