Build aria-live announcer service / component

[jelbourn]

[devversion]

How should that component look? Should it have the same functionality as in $mdAria for Material 1?

[jelbourn]

@devversion not quite. The idea here is that you have either a component or a service that makes aria-live announcements. It would be used by things like md-toast. At this point I'm leaning towards a component like

<md-a11y-announcer>

Other components can then simply inject it from higher up in the component tree.

I actually started writing one for material1 but never got around to finishing up the PR. You can find a lot more information in the issue discussion.

Polymer also has something like this, the iron-a11y-announcer. My approach was based on theirs (though I had to do a decent amount of testing to figure out why that timeout was needed).

The hardest part of this is actually testing the announcer on all of the different platforms:

• JAWS (Windows) with IE11 / Edge / Chrome / Firefox
• NVDA (Windows) with IE11 / Edge / Chrome / Firefox
• VoiceOver (OSX) with Safari / Chrome
• VoiceOver (iOS) with Safari
• TalkBack (Android) with Chrome

Which is... tedious, so say the least. They can be wildly inconsistent. Unfortunately there not really a way (yet) to automate testing of what a screen-reader says.