Question

I’m currently trying to come up with a good and accessible way to format a status indicator which should be rendered within a set of wizard-like pages on a website. The website should provide a multipage form with a status indicator on top of it as demonstrated in the wireframe below:

Given the new progress-tag in HTML my first thought was to do something like this:

<progress value="2" max="3">
    <ul>
        <li>Beginning</li>
        <li class="now">Right now</li>
        <li>End</li>
    </ul>
</progress>

… but since <progress> only accepts phrasing content using a list is not really an option. So right now I would probably go with something like this, integratinng the ARIA progressbar-role:

<ul aria-role="progressbar" aria-valuenow="2" aria-valuemin="1" aria-valuemax="3" aria-describedby="state2" aria-valuetext="Right now">
    <li id="state1">Beginning</li>
    <li id="state2" class="now">Right now</li>
    <li id="state3">End</li>
</ul>

But again, I’m not really sure if the progressbar role can be applied in such a way to a list.

Another problem is, that <progress> is rendered as progress bar in Opera, for instance, so >progress> itself is probably not really a viable solution altogether 🙁

Can anyone perhaps recommend an accessible status bar that does not only rely on using a single image?

Current solution

For now I will go with following markup:

<section class="progress">
    <h1 class="supportive">Your current progress</h1>
    <ol>
        <li><span class="supportive">Completed step:</span> Login</li>
        <li class="now"><span class="supportive">Current step:</span> Right now</li>
        <li><span class="supportive">Future step:</span> End</li>
    </ol>
</section>

All elements of the class “supportive” will be positioned off-screen. IMO this way we should have a nice compromise of semantic markup (the state succession is in my opinion really an ordered list ;-)) and accessibility thanks to the additional header and status text for each step.

Answer 1

According to whatwg, you’re not supposed to assign progressbar role to <ul> elements.

I’d just ditch <ul> and describe progress using (surprise) phrasing content:

<section role="status">
    <h2>Task Progress</h2>
    <p>You're now at <progress value=2 max=3>"Right now" step</progress>.
</section>

Update: You’re right, progress doesn’t suit here, it’s more like an interactive form widget. I should’ve checked first, before taking it from your first example. But anyway, the point is there’s no need to use a list (even more so, unordered list), when you can just describe what’s going on in plain text. In the case that the list of past and future steps is necessary, I’d just add two more paragraphs, one before the status (‘You’ve completed the “Beginning” step’), and one after (‘Next step will be the “End” step’).

However, I admit that this isn’t a complete answer to your question.

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Also, I’d say some aria attributes look redundant to me. For example, aria-valuetext perhaps would make more sense in the context of interactive widget, when there’s no other human-friendly description of its state. Though I may be wrong here.