---
layout: docs
title: Toasts
description: Push notifications to your visitors with a toast, a lightweight and easily customizable alert message.
group: components
toc: true
---
Toasts are lightweight notifications designed to mimic the push notifications that have been popularized by mobile and desktop operating systems. They're built with flexbox, so they're easy to align and position.
## Overview
Things to know when using the toast plugin:
- If you're building our JavaScript from source, it [requires `util.js`]({{ site.baseurl }}/docs/{{ site.docs_version }}/getting-started/javascript/#util).
- Toasts are opt-in for performance reasons, so **you must initialize them yourself**.
- **Please note that you are responsible for positioning toasts.**
- Toasts will automatically hide if you do not specify `autohide: false`.
{% include callout-info-prefersreducedmotion.md %}
## Examples
### Basic
To encourage extensible and predictable toasts, we recommend a header and body. Toast headers use `display: flex`, allowing easy alignment of content thanks to our margin and flexbox utilities.
Toasts are as flexible as you need and have very little required markup. At a minimum, we require a single element to contain your "toasted" content and strongly encourage a dismiss button.
{% capture example %}
Hello, world! This is a toast message.
{% endcapture %}
{% include example.html content=example class="bg-dark" %}
## Accessibility
Toasts are intended to be small interruptions to your visitors or users, so to help those with screen readers and similar assistive technologies, you should wrap your toasts in an [`aria-live` region](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Live_Regions). Changes to live regions (such as injecting/updating a toast component) are automatically announced by screen readers without needing to move the user's focus or otherwise interrupt the user. Additionally, include `aria-atomic="true"` to ensure that the entire toast is always announced as a single (atomic) unit, rather than announcing what was changed (which could lead to problems if you only update part of the toast's content, or if displaying the same toast content at a later point in time). If the information needed is important for the process, e.g. for a list of errors in a form, then use the [alert component]({{ site.baseurl }}/docs/{{ site.docs_version }}/components/alerts/) instead of toast.
Note that the live region needs to be present in the markup *before* the toast is generated or updated. If you dynamically generate both at the same time and inject them into the page, they will generally not be announced by assistive technologies.
You also need to adapt the `role` and `aria-live` level depending on the content. If it's an important message like an error, use `role="alert" aria-live="assertive"`, otherwise use `role="status" aria-live="polite"` attributes.
As the content you're displaying changes, be sure to update the [`delay` timeout](#options) to ensure people have enough time to read the toast.
{% highlight html %}