---
name: Busy state
slug: busy-state
category: accessibility
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: Marking a region as still loading so assistive technology waits for
  the finished result instead of reading each row as it streams in.
aliases:
  - name: aria-busy
    source: aria
  - name: loading region
    source: community
  - name: suppressed announcements
    source: community
tags:
  - assistive-tech
  - progress
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - atomic-live-region
    - politeness-level
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - spinner
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "WAI-ARIA 1.2: aria-busy"
    url: https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.2/#aria-busy
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: a region updates in pieces and each piece speaks
---

`aria-busy="true"` says "this part of the page is mid-change, do not read it yet". Set it before you
start writing into a region, remove it when the region is finished, and assistive technology treats
everything in between as one edit instead of as a dozen. Without it, a results list that arrives in
chunks produces a chunk's worth of speech each time, and a reader hears three fragments of three
different sentences instead of one usable result.

It is the smaller of two settings that shape what a [live region](/live-region) says, and the two
answer different questions. [Atomic](/atomic-live-region) decides *how much* gets re-read when
something changes: the changed node alone, or the whole region for context. Busy decides *whether
it is read yet at all*. A region can be atomic and still be useless if it announces four times
while it settles, and it can be busy-managed and still be useless if it then reads one number with
nothing attached.

The discipline is the same as any flag you have to take back down. Set it on the container you are
about to mutate, not on the page. Clear it in the same code path that finishes the update, including
the error path, because a region left busy forever is a region that has gone silent: readers will
skip it, and no error message you put inside it will ever be spoken. If a request can hang, clear
the flag on the timeout as well.

Two things it is not. It is not a substitute for telling the reader that work is happening, which is
what a [status message](/status-message) or a [spinner](/spinner) with an accessible name is for:
busy suppresses speech rather than producing it, so on its own it makes a slow load quieter, not
clearer. And it is not a way to say a region is stale, unavailable or switched off; those are states of the
content, and `aria-busy` is a state of the writing. Busy means one thing, which is that the markup
you are looking at is halfway written.