the quiz timer needs to be labeled as a timer with ARIA

Again, you can make it easier for me to fix this if you can tell me how to add ARIA mark-up to the page.

Greg, any chance you could make my life easy, and tell me the correct ARIA mark-up for this, like you did for the question flag one? Thanks.

So, I think this is as simple as adding a

role="timer"

attribute to the appropriate HTML element.

I think this is the right way to do it, but I am not an expert in ARIA, so please can someone peer-review this.

Hi Tim,

What you are purposing here looks spot on to me. I'm not the office expert but I have helped out a couple of the guys with issues they've worked on re: aria.
If you would like a second vote on this I would suggest including Jason as a watcher and asking his opinion, I understand he is the in office expert.

Gets a +1 from me.

Cheers
Sam

(wrong button sorry)

Jason, I would be grateful if you could peer review this. Thanks.

Perfect Tim, although the atomic attribute may be over kill. No harm in using it anyway.

Thanks Jason. Submitting for integration now.

Integrated, thanks Tim.

I tested this with NVDA. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect this attribute to do to the screen reader. It didn't make the screen reader read the timer unless I moused over the timer itself. I wasn't able to tab to the timer. It wasn't read as part of the normal content. If I was blind, I would still have no notion that there was a timer counting down.

The documentation for the timer attribute doesn't really say what is supposed to happen.

http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/roles#timer

I'm therefore assuming that my screen reader doesn't know what to do with a timer attribute yet (perhaps other screen readers do). Alternately, I assume that this is the expected behaviour for a timer.

I can say that this hasn't broken anything. The timer works as it did before.

Indeed, it is not clear what should happen.

Suppose the screen-reader read out the time every time it changed (every second!) that would be horrible.

I suppose that, if I was designing a screen-reader, I might think a sensible design was:

• announce that there is a timer on-screen when the page loads; and
• provide a keyboard short-cut to easily speak the timer value at any time.

Congratulations! Another bug solved.. only another 7330 to go, thanks for contributing to contributing to 0.8% of all bugs being fixed this week!

ciao
Dan