Accessible Toast Messages: What Developers and Designers Need to Know | Upcoming Webinar
Toast messages are built to stay out of the way. They slide in to confirm that your changes saved or your message sent, then disappear a few seconds later. For a sighted mouse user, that usually works. For screen reader users, a toast that’s never announced gives them no feedback at all, and for anyone who needs more time to read, a message that vanishes after three seconds is gone before it’s useful.
Kelsie Cleboski, CPWA (Certified Professional in Web Accessibility), sees these issues come up in real projects. As a Senior Digital Accessibility Specialist at Accessible Web, she works with teams on the small interface patterns that look fine in a design file but break down for people using assistive technology, keyboard navigation, or screen magnification. Toast messages are one of the most common.
What we’ll cover:
- Why toast messages so often fail accessibility checks, even when they look polished
- How to announce toasts to screen reader users with ARIA live regions and the status and alert roles, without pulling keyboard focus away from the user’s task
- Timing: how long a toast should stay visible, and when users need a way to pause or dismiss it
- What Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) say, including 4.1.3 Status Messages and 2.2.1 Timing Adjustable
- When a toast is the wrong choice, such as error messages or anything the user has to act on
Bring your specific toast message questions — we encourage you to ask them live throughout the session!
Join us Thursday, October 8th at 2:00 PM EST.
Can’t make it live? Register anyway — we’ll send the recording and resources straight to your inbox.
