6. Live Regions

A live region is a dynamically-updated portion of a web page, such as a table of sports statistics, a list of current stock prices, a log from a chat, or an alert displayed by the page you are reading. While live regions appear quite frequently, fully accessible web pages with live regions are encountered less often. This problem is actively being addressed by a number of organizations.

Live Region Politeness Levels

Live regions have an associated "politeness" level which is set by the author as a means to convey the importance of the information and to suggest when users should be informed by their assistive technology of updates made within that region. Live regions can be "off", "polite", or "aggressive" to the point of being "rude."

<app>Orca</app>'s Support for Live Regions

Because you might not agree with the politeness level specified by the author whose page you are viewing, Orca provides a number of live region commands which allow you to modify the level of any or all of the regions on a page. In addition, you can:

Turn live region support on or off

Jump to the next and previous live region spatially

Jump to the last live region which presented information

Review the last nine live region messages which were presented