Comment by NoahZuniga
3 days ago
> Update 7 Oct 2025: Some screen readers have been found not to announce updates to the tag, so explicitly emphasising the role attribute might be worthwhile for now until support improves: <output role="status">.
Waiting for support to improve on a 17 year old tag that is barely used anymore?
If on Windows, opening tickets on NVDA repo works wonderfully well, as long as they find them valid.
https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda
To improve the usage of screen readers that don’t respect a tag that’s parts of the standard for 17 years.
It’s obviously the screen readers’ fault.
If adding the ARIA role fixes the problem, then it's not the fault of screen readers: it's browsers not exposing the semantics properly (unless explicitly instructed to). Please don't assign blame to the "obvious" target unless you actually know who's at fault.
The output tag has an implicit aria-role=”status”. This is 100% on the particular screen reader(s) that don’t support it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
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