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Re: ARIA landmark roles and HTML 5 sectioning elements

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Jul 23, 2020 7:56AM

On 23/07/2020 14:27, Andrews, David B (DEED) wrote:
> The first rule of ARIA is only use ARIA when you can't do something via HTML.

Of course, the "rule" is essentially a best practice recommendation. And
this answer bypasses the actual question: is explicitly adding the same
ARIA role that the element has natively anyway a problem or not? It was
done in the past for some user agents that didn't have the correct
native role assignment (for instance, IE11 not recognising <main>
element, so needed an extra helping hand with <main role="main">).

More recently, Safari/VO still has a problem where an <img> with an SVG
source is not exposed as an actual image, which can be remediated with
an arguably redundant role="img".
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=187695

In answer to the original question, I'd say: it's probably more a case
of "it's pointless/redundant to do it nowadays" (depending on which
browsers you're targetting ... if you are still seeing/expecting traffic
from a lot of *really* old browsers, then it may well be necessary).
But it doesn't do any harm per se.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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