ARIA 1.2 mapping of div/span to role=generic causes lots of new failures #1995
Description
The ARIA required context role only considers parent/child relations in the accessibility tree
https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/act/rules/ff89c9/proposed/
With ARIA 1.1 this means the following code passed the rule because the inner div, between list and listitem, had no implicit role and wasn't part of the ARIA tree:
<div role="list">
<div>
<div role="listitem">List item 1</div>
<div role="listitem">List item 2</div>
<div>
</div>
Edit: in the ARIA 1.1 draft of AAM div was specified as:
No corresponding role
May not have an accessible object if has no semantic meaning
However HTML AAM was updated in w3c/html-aam#348 to map div/span to the new ARIA 1.2 generic role.
That means both these lists produce an identical ARIA tree and both now fail the rule:
<div role="list">
<div>
<div role="listitem">List item 1</div>
<div role="listitem">List item 2</div>
<div>
</div>
<div role="list">
<div role="generic">
<div role="listitem">List item 1</div>
<div role="listitem">List item 2</div>
<div>
</div>
There will be a lot of pages using divs/spans without roles that passed previously - including many of the ARIA patterns at https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/.
These haven't suddenly become less accessible - so I think the rule needs to change.