listitem rule fails with roles inheriting from the 'list' or 'listitem' roles

[rdeltour]

Expectation: Axe would not report a failure to the rule listitem when native list elements (ol,ul,li) declare a more specific role inheriting from their native role (e.g. role="directory" on ul, role="doc-biblioentry on li, etc.).

Actual: the rule listitem fails.

Motivation: even if some of those roles may have limited accessibility support (like the DPUB roles), using them on elements with native list semantics is an appropriate fallback and should pass the rule.

axe-core version: 3.2.2

Example 1 of markup that will fail the rule listitem

<ul>
  <li role="doc-biblioentry">an entry</li>
  …
</ul>

Example 2 of markup that will fail the rule listitem

<ol role="directory">
   <li><a href="preface_001.xhtml">Original Transcriber’s Notes:</a></li>
   <li><a href="introduction_001.xhtml">ETYMOLOGY.</a></li>
   <li><a href="epigraph_001.xhtml">EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).</a></li>
   <li><a href="chapter_001.xhtml">Chapter 1. Loomings.</a></li>
   …
</ol>

[rdeltour]

If you agree this is a false-positive, I can submit at PR 😊

[straker]

Sounds good to me, a PR would be great! Just to be clear, did you mean that

<ul>
  <li role="doc-biblioentry">an entry</li>
  …
</ul>

fails the list rule?

[WilcoFiers]

Totally agreed, although I'm not sure there's an obvious fix for it. Axe-core doesn't have a good representation of the ARIA role hierarchy. If you find it's going to be a complicated fix, please put together a proposal. Don't want to waste a whole bunch of time and then find out there's some (possibly unrelated) edge case that makes it not work.

[rdeltour]

@straker

did you mean that (…) fails the list rule?

Yes, that one would fail the list rule (only-list-items check), and the other example I gave in the OP would fail the listitem rule (listitem check).

@WilcoFiers

I'm not sure there's an obvious fix for it. Axe-core doesn't have a good representation of the ARIA role hierarchy.

In our local patches to Axe we used the axe.commons.aria.getRoleType(role) API, which is based on the lookup table. It may not be perfect (i.e. will not support transitive inheritance) but should be enough in this case?
See our patch for the only-list-items check and our patch for the listitem check.

[straker]

There are other role types that aren't listitem that can be used on <li> items that will still fail the list rule (e.g. menuitemradio, menuitemcheckbox). Would it be possible to use the aria.isAriaRoleAllowedOnElement api to see if the role is allowed on the element instead of just looking at listitem type roles?

[WilcoFiers]

@rdeltour I was just reviewing this ACT-R rules:
https://github.com/act-rules/act-rules.github.io/pull/255/files

I started digging a little, and according to dpub-aria, doc-biblioentry has doc-bibliography as a required context, so a ul without role="doc-bibliography" should fail, no?

[rdeltour]

I started digging a little, and according to dpub-aria, doc-biblioentry has doc-bibliography as a required context, so a ul without role="doc-bibliography" should fail, no?

Yes, I think it should fail.

[WilcoFiers]

Looking at this again. At this point both directory and doc-biblioentry are proposed to be deprecated, exactly for the reason that its inheritance creates confusion. Neither of these use cases is valid according to ARIA 1.1, so we're going to leave these as failures for axe-core.