I need you all to promise me you’ll be cool about this. I‘m here to tell you about an upcoming web platform feature that has been a long time coming; a feature that not only fulfills a use case sorely overdue for a better solution, but does so by way of a syntax that is both immediately understandable and deceptively powerful. That’s right, this thing is developer catnip, and I don’t mind saying that I was really excited to try it out — after which point I willed myself to tuck it away in a drawer and put it out of my mind. This is a tool only to be used in situations where it is absolutely, one hundred percent necessary, to solve a problem that cannot be solved in any other way, up to and including “push back against building a feature in the first place.” So just be cool about this, okay? Okay.
There’s a brand new ariaNotify() method — defined by the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.3 Specification — that provides you with a means of programmatically triggering narration in a screen reader. It accepts a string as its first argument, and an optional configuration object as its second:
document.ariaNotify( "Hello, World." );
// When invoked, a screen reader will narrate "Hello, World."
