STANDARD 6.1 — When a programmed timed response is used on a web site, a notification will be provided on that web page, identifying the time limits and providing the option to extend or remove the limit.
Comment: Pages that time out rapidly may not give the users of assistive technology enough time to complete the task. With warning, these people may be able to make other arrangements, perhaps preparing responses in advance in a text editor for copy and paste. It is even better, though, when the developer provides a mechanism for extending or removing the time limit.
This is particularly a problem for people with motion disorders. Lack of motor control makes typing difficult, and a mouse virtually useless. Some people need to use wands that are attached to their head or held in their mouth to touch the keys. Others use a switch with a scrolling cursor. First the cursor scrolls from top to bottom. When the scan line reaches the proper distance from the top of the screen, the switch is depressed. A scroll line them moves from left to right. When the line reaches the correct distance from the left of the screen, the switch is depressed again. The device then sends the X,Y coordinates to the computer as a mouse click. It does not take a lot of imagination to see how time consuming this can be.
STANDARD 6.2 — Client-side auto-refresh or client-side auto-redirect will not be used without a mechanism in place to first alert the user.
Comment: When a page refreshes in the "seeing world," it takes very little time to find the point where the visitor had been reading. When a page refreshes in the "non-seeing" world, the user must listen to a screen reader work its way through all the text again to return to the point where the user left off ... at which point the page refreshes again, and the process starts over.
At the very least, this standard requires the developer to alert visitors that the page will refresh. Even better is a mechanism to turn off the refresh. This gives the visitor the opportunity to read the entire page without being forced to start over.