Bug 273089 – AX: Remove AccessibilityRole::ApplicationGroup and AccessibilityRole::ApplicationTextGroup to simplify group logic

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: FIXED
• Component: Accessibility

[Tyler Wilcock]

Currently, there are four "group" roles: Group, ApplicationGroup, TextGroup, ApplicationTextGroup. The original intention for separating these was that the Application style roles were explicitly defined by the author (e.g. via role="group" for ApplicationGroup and role="doc-example" for ApplicationTextGroup), while the non-Application variants were implicitly assigned via heuristics done by the user agent (WebKit).

However, that distinction has become muddied over time:

  1. To support Web Inspector and WPTs, AccessibilityRole::Group has (sometimes) become synonymous with "generic" (mostly because we used to assign this role to nearly every div on the page). This is confusing because it doesn't match or map to role="group" (which is AccessibilityRole::ApplicationGroup).
  2. Partially due to point one, in several places we have started returning ApplicationGroup even when the element is not explicitly assigned as such (i.e. via role="group"), going against the point of this role's existence.

It's confusing to have this many group-style roles. We should change this.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/126880483>

[Tyler Wilcock]

Created attachment 471045 [details]
Patch

[Tyler Wilcock]

Created attachment 471054 [details]
Patch

[EWS]

Committed 277894@main (95019f166e2d): <https://commits.webkit.org/277894@main>

All reviewed patches have been landed. Closing bug and clearing flags on attachment 471054 [details].