Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why are my live regions not working? (via) Useful article to help understand ARIA live regions. Short version: you can add a live region to your page like this:

<div id="notification" aria-live="assertive"></div>

Then any time you use JavaScript to modify the text content in that element it will be announced straight away by any screen readers - that's the "assertive" part. Using "polite" instead will cause the notification to be queued up for when the user is idle instead.

There are quite a few catches. Most notably, the contents of an aria-live region will usually NOT be spoken out loud when the page first loads, or when that element is added to the DOM. You need to ensure the element is available and not hidden before updating it for the effect to work reliably across different screen readers.

I got Claude Artifacts to help me build a demo for this, which is now available at tools.simonwillison.net/aria-live-regions. The demo includes instructions for turning VoiceOver on and off on both iOS and macOS to help try that out.