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Is ARIA the best way to go here, or something else, words with functionality that are not links

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Dec 12, 2011 3:03PM

Good afternoon everyone.
I am giving an accessibbility assessment of a webpage
http://www.akureyri.is
One particular thing bothers me about this page.
There are two words
"vinsælast" og "nytsamlegt" (most popular and useful info, to
translate the phrases). These appear, at least in the sourcecode,
right after a list of the news stories, not sure how these are located
visually.

There is no indication that these are anything but words inside an
otherwise empty list, but by looking at the sourcecode, I see that
they trigger Javascript that displays a list of relevant links when
activated. Using enter to activate the words works just fine, but an
average user would never think of trying that, and I only did because
they looked peculiar to me and I looked in the sourcecode of the page.
What would you recommend, in this scenario, that needs to change to
clearly indicate what happens. Sounds like an aria label would be a
good and quick solution, but I am still not up to speed on aria
(getting there), so not 100% sure which particular aria technique to
recommend. Should these words be made active links or buttons (I know
that can be done via aria), so that the users realize they have
functionality that can be triggerred via a keyboard?
Thanks
-Birkir