There has been some talk on the list about enhancing the live region settings.
According to one user What I think we haven't really explored yet is clever ways to take advantage of what ARIA provides. For instance, ARIA specifies setting various states for live region, rude, polite, off, etc. But this only controls whether data in that region is automatically passed to AT.
There's no requirement that AT map a hotkey to read data from a particular live region on user command, or that AT perhaps map data in a live region to a sonic representation that could play through the audio channel. All that's now possible, but yet to be explored.  She adds: I believe we can expect more and more use of live regions, not less.
> There are just too many ways that live regions make practical sense in 
> a visual interface. Note that their attraction is that the entire page 
> doesn't have to get reloaded--only the region in question. So much 
> less traffic over the Internet connection.  Furthermore, we've got support in all the major browsers--though I 
> think this is where we need support to be more robust for us. Between 
> the AT and the browser, it should be a bit easier to huristically 
> identify live regions and handle them appropriately. Especially, it is 
> critical to keep a frequently updating region from grabbing focus. My 
> current example of insufficiency here is the second by second clock 
> ticking away on the Federal Express "My Fed Ex" pages.