[Commentor] LC-307 Ian Jacobs [Comment] * In developing UAAG 1.0, which addresses these topics, we distinguished two concerns (1) the (visual or other sensory) disorientation caused by suddenly opening windows and (2) the change in focus. * I urge you to recast these in terms of thecheckpoints of Guideline 5of the UAAG 1.0 Recommendation. I am happy to discuss them further with you to help answer any questions. * In particular, an important point is that it's ok to do these things when the user says it's ok. * For the point about "unless you have informed the user", that may be locking up the barn after the horse has been stolen. I think it's more important to provide an alternative. [Commentor reply] yes [Working Group decision] 
We don't mean to be prescriptive about providing a means of helping the user choose, we do mean that there must be a way of telling the user that the page will refresh and of stopping refresh once it has started. Any other consideration is more to do with User Agents, which is out of scope for this document.