Bug 201581 – AX: HTML menu element should map to role=list

• Component: Accessibility
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Scott]

Created attachment 378291 [details]
test case of menu pattern and ul pattern to verify menus are not exposed the same as unordered lists

Steps to reproduce:

- Open the provided reduced test case.
- Check accessibility mappings to verify that menu is not mapped as a list, though it should be a semantic alternative to the UL element.
- Attempting to navigate to the menu or its child list items with a screen reader will either not work, or the screen reader will try to expose each list item as a separate single item list, depending on the browser and screen reader pairing used.


Actual results:

The menu is not exposed as a list and thus it and the list items within cannot be consistently navigated to, if at all, when navigating by lists or list items when using a screen reader with Firefox.


Expected results:

Per the HTML specification: "The menu element is simply a semantic alternative to ul..."

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html#the-menu-element

Since the menu element should be semantically equal to a UL, and is expected to contain LI elements, it should map similarly to a UL element to allow assistive technologies to navigate to understand & navigate to the element and the contained list items.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/55145117>

[Scott]

Re-reviewing this ticket today, I can confirm that Chromium browsers and Firefox correctly expose a <menu> as a list. Webkit still does not have the correct mapping for this element.

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

https://w3c.github.io/html-aam/ also seems to say it's mapped to list role.

Checking AccessibilityNodeObject::determineAccessibilityRoleFromNode ( https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/accessibility/AccessibilityNodeObject.cpp#L262 ) I see:

- <ol> and <ul> are mapped to AccessibilityRole::List;
- <menu type="toolbar"> tag is mapped to AccessibilityRole::Toolbar ; we'll need to check/think about this, but the type attribute seems to be obsolete per https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#attr-menu-type
- other <menu> elements are not handled.

I see Firefox maps to list too: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/4a15041348e08fb0d6f5726015c32861e663fbfe/accessible/base/HTMLMarkupMap.h#279

I haven't checked yet what Chromium does.

Assigning to Sirri.

[Sirri Celles]

Pull request: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/3571

[Anne van Kesteren]

Pull request: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/13872

[EWS]

Committed 264077@main (af6778aa0405): <https://commits.webkit.org/264077@main>

Reviewed commits have been landed. Closing PR #13872 and removing active labels.