Comment by croes
To improve the usage of screen readers that don’t respect a tag that’s parts of the standard for 17 years.
It’s obviously the screen readers’ fault.
To improve the usage of screen readers that don’t respect a tag that’s parts of the standard for 17 years.
It’s obviously the screen readers’ fault.
The output tag has an implicit aria-role=”status”. This is 100% on the particular screen reader(s) that don’t support it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
If the screen reader were at fault, then explicitly specifying the implicit role (something that should be a no-op) would not fix the problem. It's the responsibility of web browsers to implement and expose implicit ARIA roles (see https://www.w3.org/TR/html-aam-1.0/#mapping-html-to-accessib...). Screen readers do not (in general) speak HTML, just like computer monitors do not (in general) speak CSS.
If that were true, no screen readers would work, which is not the case.
If adding the ARIA role fixes the problem, then it's not the fault of screen readers: it's browsers not exposing the semantics properly (unless explicitly instructed to). Please don't assign blame to the "obvious" target unless you actually know who's at fault.