This translation has not been editorially reviewed yet. The German version is authoritative. Deutsche Fassung →
Name, role, value, and status messages: what assistive technology reads from the code
Every control must let assistive technology recognise its name, what it is, and what state it's in. And messages that appear without a page change — "saved", "3 results", "error" — must be announced, without moving the focus.
- Anyone using standard elements meets most of this automatically: a <button> reports its role and state with no extra work. Problems arise with homemade elements — a <div> with a click handler has no role, no name, and no state.
- ARIA is both a tool and a source of errors here: wrongly set attributes make things worse than having none at all. An aria-expanded that doesn't track the actual state actively tells the user something wrong.
- Status messages come up most often with search fields that show instant results: the result count changes visibly, but is never announced. Anyone who can't see it never finds out.
