aria-roles

ARIA roles used must conform to valid values

Who might be affected
Screen Reader
Voice Control

Description

The first claim in the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1 document, just after the introduction, states: "No ARIA is better than Bad ARIA". This means: "Incorrect ARIA misrepresents visual experiences, with potentially devastating effects on their corresponding non-visual experiences". The role attribute allows for the coercion of semantic meaning on non-semantic elements and also extends the built-in semantics of HTML to express more complex semantic ideas that allow screen readers to read the content more accurately and clearly. Since there is a lot of semantics to cover, the list of the possible values the role attribute can be assigned to is long and diverse, so sometimes the impression is created that the role attribute can have any value. This is not the case; invalid values may cause incorrect readings of the UI and therefore mislead the user.

Quick Fixes

See the full list of allowed role values.

How Users Are Affected

Users that are dependant on screen readers, or other assistive technology that uses text parsing to convey the content to the user, will not be able to perceive and interact with the content correctly.

WCAG Success criteria

This issue might cause elements to fail one or more of the following Success criteria:
4.1.2 Name, Role, Value (A)