aria-roledescription

[WW3]

recognized as [critical] invalid aria attribute.
see https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#aria-roledescription

[marcysutton]

Thanks, we are starting to add support for ARIA 1.1 so we'll add this to the list.

[WilcoFiers]

I don't think we can support this until there is widespread adoption of this in assistive technologies. It seems to me that most use cases for this attribute would cause problems for users of AT that don't support it.

[WilcoFiers]

Closing the issue as aria-roledescription is currently unsupported in a number of popular screen readers. We are working on accessibility supported checks which will make it easier to configure this sort of stuff in the future, but we're not going to add it by default until assistive technologies support has improved.

[gnapse]

Hmmm, it seems weird to me that being valid and documented, an axe audit still flags it as an invalid attribute to code using this attribute. At the very least flag its uses and warn users running these audits that the attribute is not widely implemented in assistive technologies. But saying it's an incorrect attribute, when it can be found in plain sight in aria documentation, can be confusing.

[WilcoFiers]

@gnapse We are planning to improve the messaging around unsupported accessibility features. We've added one such feature for unsupported roles. unsupported attributes is next on the list. Stay tuned!

[attilavago]

Yeah, I'd like this to be supported as well. It's starting to be adopted more and more, so pretty please? :)

[padraig-ohiceadha]

I believe this is now supported by JAWS, and VoiceOver for Safari on the Mac, and Firefox with NVDA so supporting it, or at least changing the message returned from "Invalid ARIA attribute name" to a warning that it may cause issues with some screen readers would be very useful.

[iamrafan]

I tested for support across the current browser/ATs, here are the results

	AT/Browser	Announced as	Is aria-roledescription announced?
1	Edge/Narrator	Here Split button	Yes
2	Edge/JAWS	Here Button	No
3	Edge/NVDA	Split button here	Yes
4	Chrome/NVDA	Split button here	Yes
5	Chrome/JAWS	Here Split button	Yes
6	IE/JAWS	Here split button	Yes
7	IE/NVDA	Split button here	Yes
8	Firefox/NVDA	Split button here	Yes

#1216