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jQuery Live Regions

This is a simple, easy to use plugin for managing live regions on a page, including adding new content or swapping content in the live region.

Getting Started

Download the production version or the development version.

Install via bower:

bower install jquery-live-regions --save

Creating live region

Primary Use Case

Live Regions allows the user of assistive technologies to be notified of content changes that may occur automatically and may not be explicitly triggered by the user. The content change may exist separate to what object has focus, and so Live Regions facilitate these notifications. Possible examples include:

  • Chat logs
  • Error logs
  • Stock tickers
  • Timers
  • Progress indicators
  • Form validation messages

There are many types of changes that occur in the typical web-based applications and essentially any content that changes dynamically is a candidate for a live region.

Secondary Use Case

Some changes to content on a page should trigger notifications to the user of assistive technologies, but don't. This pluging can be used as a "notifier" of sorts, to add these relevant notifications.

Super simple method

$('#foo').liveRegion();

The above method creates a live region with default values. Modifications to the content within the live region will be announced by assistive technology.

Give it a label

$('#foo').liveRegion({label: 'News Ticker'});

This will create a live region with an aria-label of "New Ticker"

Use it as a notifier

Consider the following use case where a user searches for clothing products. When the user refines their search options, such as size and color, the results list is dynamically updated client-side (or via AJAX).

// Set up the "notifier" as a container for notices
var notifer = $('#notifier');
notifier.liveRegion({
  label: 'Search Status',
  role: 'region', 
  live: 'assertive'
});

Now, the user triggers the search and results are refined

notifier.liveRegion({
  replace: 'true',
  text: 'Search results updated: ' + num + ' results. Size: ' + sSize + ', Color: ' +sColor;
});

The above example shows the live region indicating to the user that search results were updated and lists out the search criteria.

Full list of available properties

Note: You are not required to provide any of these values. They will be set to sensible defaults if they aren't supplied.

  • labelledby - Points to an ID of another element on screen to use as a label. Becomes aria-labelledby on the live region.
  • label - String of text provided to serve as a label. Becomes aria-label attribute on the live region.
  • role - what type of live region is this? Options are:
    • log
    • status
    • alert
    • marquee
    • timer
    • progressbar
    • region
  • atomic - Valid values are 'true' and 'false'. NOTE: these must be strings, not booleans. Non-intuitive, I know.
  • live - Indicates how important the content is. Valid values are 'polite' and 'assertive'. It is best to use 'polite' unless this is an urgent notice of some kind. Becomes aria-live attribute on the live region
  • relevant - what are the relevant changes you want to announce? Becomes aria-relevant on the live region.
    • additions
    • removals
    • text
    • all
  • busy - is the live region busy or not. Valid values are 'true' and 'false'. As before, must be strings.
  • className - CSS class name to be added to the node
  • replace - boolean representing whether or not the current text is to be replaced or not. If false, the text (defined below) will be appended to the live region node. If true, all existing content is removed first.
  • text - string of text (or HTML) to be inserted into the live region.

Sample use with all available properties:

$('#foo').liveRegion({
    label: 'Chat Log',
    role: 'log',
    atomic: 'false',
    live: 'polite',
    relevant: 'additions text',
    busy: 'false',
    className: 'tblLiveCaption'
    replace: true,
    text: 'User List, assorted by last name descending'
});

Overriding Values

There may be times when you want to override one or more of the existing values. For instance, in the case where you're waiting for new content to arrive from Ajax:

// the default set up
$('#foo').liveRegion({
    label: 'Chat Log',
    role: 'log',
    atomic: 'false',
    live: 'polite',
    relevant: 'additions text',
    busy: 'false'
});

// when waiting for the new content
if(we-are-waiting-for-the-new-content){
	$('#foo').liveRegion({ 
	  busy: 'true'
	});
}

In the above scenario, the original settings are retained and only the aria-busy value is modified.

More information:

A complete tutorial on live regions is out of the scope of this README. Browse the following for more info: