Rule library ARIA

ARIA role should be appropriate for the element

aria-allowed-roleBest practice

Ensure role attribute has an appropriate value for the element

Who this affects

An element is given an ARIA role that is not valid for that element type.

How to fix it

Remove the role, or move it to an element the role is allowed on.

Effort Low · ~15 min

How to check it by hand

Inspect the element in the browser's accessibility tree — the Accessibility panel in Chrome or Firefox DevTools. Compare the computed role, name and state with what a sighted user sees. Where they disagree, the ARIA is wrong. Native HTML is almost always the safer fix.

Automated testing settles roughly a third of the WCAG success criteria. This rule is one an automated tool detects reliably — but a clean automated result is not proof of conformance.

Reference

Deque's technical write-up for this rule: aria-allowed-role

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