Accessible, 508 compliant Ajax Loading Indicator

Question

How do I make an Ajax Loading Indicator Accessible / 508 compliant. My pre-compliance strategy is like so: initiate ajax request, set timeout to show an indicator(div containing a paragraph with text and a spinner in the center of the screen) if the request doesn't finish within one second, if the indicator is showing when the request is complete, remove indicator. I've tried doing things like setting focus on the indicator text to no avail. JAWS version 9 (which does not support WAI-ARIA) is the target screen reader and I am using jQuery though any solution will do.

Thanks!

Affliction

I think you've set yourself a very high barrier to success - my experience and research indicates that it's nigh impossible. If you are successful, please update! Here's a link with some interesting research: articles.sitepoint.com/article/ajax-screenreaders-work – Hildegardhildegarde

That link is quite out of date, see marcozehe.de/2009/07/01/… – Overthecounter

Excellent link, thanks! WAI-ARIA is new to me, I kinda checked out of the accessibility world when it seemed like none of the screenreader vendors were going to step up and do anything about lack of AJAX support. Nice to see there's finally some movement... – Hildegardhildegarde

Answer 1

If your using Jaws 9 there's no way to do this. I can think of two options. One is pop up an alert box telling the user to be pacient. Option two would be to add a read only text field and update that field with the timer value. I think jaws will notice the change if the user enters forms mode but can't test this out since I don't have a setup up for web development. I'd really suggest you push for a new version of Jaws and use WAI-ARIA as a selling point. Live reagons would make this a lot easyer.

Overthecounter

Thanks @Jared. I don't think the alert box would go over well, and I tried your idea about using a read only text field, but the results were erratic. I will inquire whether there is any possibility for us to target a newer version of JAWS (do you think JAWS 10 would be good enough? Obviously the newer the better, but you know how that goes...). Also, do you know whether IE7 (another requirement) supports WAI-ARIA / live regions? Thanks! – Affliction