You may have recently read Adrian Roselli’s Scraping Burned Toast, Chris Coyier’s summary of the current “toast conversation”. Or maybe you’ve browsed the GitHub repository for A Standard ‘Toast’ UI Element and its WICG discussion thread.
Or maybe you’re familiar with the concept of toasts from Android development and Material Design.
But regardless of how familiar you are with the concept of a “toast”, work has been progressing on try to pave the existing cow paths different UI library definitions have set for said potential component. Unfortunately, the level of concern given to the accessibility and inclusive UX of a toast component varies quite a bit, depending on which component library you review.
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Defining a toast
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At a high level, toasts should be used to indicate the completion of a task or process initiated by the user or the application itself. For instance, a notification verifying the saving of a file, that a message had been properly sent, or a that a meeting was about to start.
If someone were to ignore, or miss a toast message, due to its timed display, there should be no negative impact on their current activities or the status that the message conveyed. Using the previous examples, ignoring a toast message would still mean that a file was saved, that a message was sent, or that a meeting was about to start.
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Inclusive UX of a toast
A toast component should be considered a type of status message, and thus should be given a
role="status". This will ensure that when a toast is displayed on screen, its contents will be, politely, communicated to assistive technologies, such as screen readers.Ideally, a toast component should contain no interactive controls, as by doing so an immediate divergence of inclusive UX is introduced.
See the source link for a list of issues and some ways to mitigate them.