[robin_reala]

Let’s give a concrete and catastrophic example of something I’ve seen in the wild in a professional product. A developer there had obviously seen the application role[1] in the ARIA specs, thought “I’m building a web app”, and added it to their html element.

What role="application" means to assistive tech is: “I’m building a really complex application, so I’m going to handle absolutely everything for you, I don’t want you to have any default behaviour.” This meant that the web app in question was 100% unusable for any people using assistive technology, as that was broadly as far as they’d got with accessibility support.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

[gampleman]

That does seem catastrophically misguided. I’m more curious about the more common case where tags are used as documented (and I really wish the documentation was better), but perhaps not completely. For instance we have a Finder like UI in our web app that conceptually is a treegrid, but we don’t support all of the keyboard interactions advised at the above website.

Should we remove the role attributes?

[robin_reala]

What would be better for your users? What have you discovered in research?

If you don’t know, and you’re not doing research, your best bet is to match the standardised semantics and interactions as best as possible, or at least have backlogged items to do so.

[tdeck]

Stories like this make me wonder if we could build a Chrome extension with a collection of crowd-sourced site-specific accessibility tweaks. Things like removing that bad ARIA tag or bodging in proper labels or tabindexes. It wouldn't be perfect, but neither is AdBlock and it offers a lot of benefit.