Do not use Dynamic Refresh

Table of Contents

1. Priority
2. Description
3. More Info
4. Coding/Best Practices
5. Testing/QA
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
7. W3C Guidelines

Priority:

Required

Short Discription:

A method MUST be provided to adjust speed of, pause or disable Dynamic displays (tickers, etc.) through an onscreen control or client preference (a cookie). Onscreen control is preferred.

More Info:

Dynamic Refresh will cause a screen reader to begin reading from the top of the page. To a person who uses a screen reader, having it refresh in mid-sentence is very annoying. If your page must use a dynamic refresh, you should provide a method for the user to turn it off. This can be accomplished without effecting sighted users by using a one pixel image and href.

Coding:

Best Practices:

None

Guidelines

• Provide capability to adjust speed of, pause or disable Dynamic displays (tickers, etc.) through an onscreen control or client preference. Onscreen control is preferred.
• If you cannot avoid using an automatic refresh, you must provide a method to disable it. You may want to consider using a one by one pixel image blended into the background to allow users to disable and or set the interval for the automatic refresh.
• The alt attribute of the image may be used to convey the status of the refresh (either on or off), and contain instructions about its use.

Testing:

Guidelines:

• One way is to wait to see if the page refreshes itself automatically.
• Another way is to view the source code and look for a line that uses a meta refresh html tag.
  • It will look something like this.
  • <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="600">
• There are other ways to refresh a page. Using Javascript you can use a window.location to forward at given intervals, but this is often hidden in JS files that are read at page load time, and do not appear in the source code. If this is the case, you simply have to wait and see if the page refreshes.
• Applications like web mail will often use this to check to see if there is any new email.
• Most pages do not use this.

SEO:

No known SEO issues.

W3C:

HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Metadata (1.1.3 The META element)

Page updates and new windows