---
name: Politeness level
slug: politeness-level
category: accessibility
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: "The urgency setting on a live region: polite waits for a pause in
  speech, assertive interrupts whatever is being read."
aliases:
  - name: aria-live polite
    source: aria
  - name: assertive
    source: aria
  - name: live region politeness
    source: community
  - name: announcement queue
    source: community
tags:
  - assistive-tech
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - atomic-live-region
    - busy-state
    - live-region
    - verbosity
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "MDN: aria-live"
    url: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Reference/Attributes/aria-live
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: choosing whether an update may interrupt speech
---

`aria-live` takes three values and they are a queue policy, not a volume knob. `off` is the
default: changes inside the element are not announced at all. `polite` puts the new text at
the back of the queue, so the screen reader finishes the sentence it is speaking, finishes
anything already waiting, and then reads it. `assertive` clears the queue and speaks
immediately, abandoning the current utterance mid-word. Nothing about the visual design
changes; the setting only decides where in a stream of speech the update lands. What a
[live region](/live-region) is, and how one is wired up, belongs to that entry.

Assertive is almost always the wrong answer, because interrupting means destroying: the
sentence the reader was listening to is gone, and there is no way to ask for it back. That
cost is worth paying only when acting late is worse than losing the sentence, which in
practice means a session about to expire, a connection dropping mid-transaction, or a
validation failure that has already blocked a submit the person just made. A saved draft, a
finished upload, a filter that returned nine results: all of those are polite, because
waiting two seconds costs nobody anything. The rule of thumb that survives review is to
write `polite` by default and make anyone proposing `assertive` say out loud what the reader
loses.

Two shorthands sit on top of the attribute. `role="status"` carries an implicit polite
politeness, and `role="alert"` carries assertive plus an implicit `aria-atomic="true"`, so
the whole region is re-read rather than just the changed words. Reaching for the role
instead of the attribute is usually better, since the role also tells assistive technology
what kind of thing the region is, and a
[status message](/status-message) is the pattern most of these updates actually are.

The failure modes are queue failures. Several polite regions updated in the same tick pile
up and are read one after another, so a page that announces every filter change announces
four of them by the time the reader has stopped typing. An assertive region that fires
repeatedly makes speech unusable, since each new message kills the one before it, including
its own predecessor. And a region that is emptied and refilled in quick succession may be
read twice or not at all, depending on the screen reader, which is why an announcer usually
debounces and writes one final string rather than a running commentary.