A status message is a change in content that tells you how something went, without moving focus to it. The definition names four kinds. The success or result of an action, a waiting state, progress through a process, and the existence of errors. Spinners and progress bars are in scope, which surprises people, because the confirmations get all the attention. The defining feature is the one people miss. If focus moves to the message it is not a status message and the rule does not apply, since a change of context has already interrupted the reader and been announced anyway. The rule exists for everything else, the text that appears quietly somewhere on the page while a sighted reader catches it out of the corner of an eye.
In practice
The mechanism is a live region, and the commonest implementation error is a timing one. The region has to be sitting on the page, carrying its role, before the message goes into it. Create the region and the text in the same operation and usually nothing is announced at all, because there was never anything for the browser to watch. Start with an empty region. Put the words in as a separate step. The alert role is the exception, because ARIA asks the browser to fire a system alert event when an alert is created, so that one is designed to speak on arrival.
Pick the role, not the volume. A status role is the everyday answer, and it announces politely, waiting until the screen reader finishes what it was already saying. An alert role interrupts, and it is for the small number of messages that genuinely cannot wait. ARIA tells authors not to reach for the interrupting kind unless the interruption is imperative, because an interruption can throw somebody off the task they were completing. W3C also lists over-using it as a failure it intends to write up, though it has not published one yet, so the argument you can cite today is ARIA's.
Two scope limits are worth having. The criterion is written for content implemented using markup languages, so it does not reach everything a product might do. And the list of results from a search is not a status message, although the count of them is. Wrap a live region around the whole results block and it announces far more than the rule ever asked for. The page becomes unusable in the process.
Why it matters
A sighted reader picks a confirmation up in peripheral vision without stopping what they were doing. Somebody using a screen reader gets nothing unless the page announces it. The question of whether it worked goes unanswered, and the only way to find out is to go looking. Marking the message up honestly rather than loudly matters for the same reason. Once the role is right, assistive technology can delay the message, suppress it, or bring it forward according to what its own user asked for. Assertive is a request rather than a guarantee, and every product handles it slightly differently, but marking everything urgent is the surest way to push past the setting somebody chose.
What counts
Saved. Five items in your basket. Invalid entry, above the postal code field. Application busy. A progress bar that speaks up as it fills. Five results returned, though not the five results themselves. Every one of those appears without focus moving, and every one of them needs announcing.
Where this shows up on the site
Related terms
- Live regionA live region is a part of the page marked so that assistive technology announces changes to it without the user having to go and look.
- Toast notificationA toast notification is a short message that appears, usually to confirm something worked, and takes itself away on a timer.
- Error identificationError identification is the Level A rule that when your form rejects something, the page names the field that failed and says in text what went wrong.
- Screen readerA screen reader is software that reads the screen out loud, or sends it to a braille display, for people who cannot see it.
- Change of contextA change of context is one of four things, and only four.
Knowing the word is the easy part.
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