About
Purpose
The purpose of this success criterion is to ensure that assistive technologies can make users aware when new status messages are written that do not receive focus.
How to Meet
WCAG defines a status message as one "that provides information to the user on the success or results of an action, on the waiting state of an application, on the progress of a process, or on the existence of errors".
If authors generate these kinds of status messages (e.g., alerts that users have input invalid information, animated progress bars), they need to make sure that they use an ARIA live region role so assistive technologies are aware of the changes in status.
Note that this success criterion does not apply if the status message is given focus. A status message generated in a JavaScript alert dialog, for example, requires the user's attention to dismiss it so does not fall under this success criterion.
Additional Information
The following knowledge base pages provide more information about how to address this success criterion for publishing content: