Description
About 6 months ago, Chromium has implemented the new ARIA roles sectionfooter and sectionheader as implicit roles for the header and footer elements for instances when they were previously exposed as generic, rather than their respective landmark roles.
While the updated role descriptions are exposed in chromium's accessibility tree, NVDA exposes these roles as "groupings", which at least is better than generic - but not the intent for the new roles.
NOTE: firefox has yet to implement these new implicit roles for the header and footer elements.
Steps to reproduce:
go to https://codepen.io/scottohara/full/OJKGJEP
or here is similar markup to reproduce:
<body>
<header> should be an unnamed banner landmark </header>
<header aria-label=b> should be a banner landmark with the name "b" </header>
<main>
<header> should be an unnamed sectionheader - the role should not be announced by NVDA when unnamed </header>
<header aria-label=h> should be a sectionheader with the name "h". the role should be announced. </header>
<footer> should be an unnamed sectionfooter the role should not be announced by NVDA when unnamed </footer>
<footer aria-label=f> should be a sectionfooter with the name "f". the role should be announced. </footer>
</main>
<footer> should be an unnamed contentinfo landmark </footer>
<footer aria-label=c> should be a contentinfo landmark with the name "c" </footer>
</body>using virtual cursor, navigate through the example to listen for the roles that are announced.
Actual behavior:
for the header and footer elements that are children of the main element, but are unnamed, NVDA is correctly not announcing the role for the elements.
for the header and footer elements that are children of the main element, and are named, NVDA is announcing their role as "grouping".
Expected behavior:
for the header and footer elements that are children of the main element, and are named, NVDA should be announcing the intended roles as "sectionheader", "sectionfooter", or a similar roledescription that NVDA sees fit to expose. E.g., simply "header" and "footer".
System configuration
NVDA installed/portable/running from source:
installed
NVDA version:
2024.4.2
Windows version:
win 11 enterprise - 24H2
Have you tried any other versions of NVDA? If so, please report their behaviors.
- 2024.4.1
- I last tested this back in november of 2024 with the latest version of NVDA at the time, and had the same behavior as reported.