Ensures Elements With an ARIA Role that Require Child Roles Contain Them

Yotam Flohr
Researcher
Blind Low vision Hearing Mobility
WCAG 2.1 Level A

Written and researched for humans by humans

Yotam Flohr
Researcher
Ritvik Shrivastava
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Some ARIA parent role values that are applied to elements must contain specific child elements and role values in order to perform the intended accessibility function.

Why It Matters

ARIA roles that are missing the required child roles will not be able to perform the accessibility functions they are meant to.

Assistive technology needs this information to provide users with context. 

Fixing the Issue

Ensure elements including explicit or implicit ARIA roles include the necessary children elements.

The following attribute values indicate relationships between an element that can’t be immediately determined from the document structure. 

  • aria-activedescendant
  • aria-controls
  • aria-describedby
  • aria-flowto
  • aria-labelledby
  • aria-owns
  • aria-posinset
  • aria-setsize
  • role=”combobox”

Test Cases

For more examples, visit the following pages in the W3C’s GitHub’s ATC Rules library: