Accessibility: ARIA role doc-endnote is deprecated.

[mejiaj]

doc-backlink, doc-endnote, doc-endnotes, and doc-noteref should be removed and instead rely on native semantic elements like <ol>, <ul>, and <li>.

---

If you run the ARIA validator extension in Chrome on a page like:
https://designsystem.digital.gov/next/introduction/

You'll get the following:

Per DPUB-ARIA 1.0 Recommendation:

23-July-2020: Deprecated the doc-biblioentry and doc-endnote roles due to the inability of them to be recognized as children of list. See issue 15.

You can view the full changelog here: https://w3c.github.io/dpub-aria/#changelog

[BryceStevenWilley]

doc-backlink, doc-endnote, doc-endnotes, and doc-noteref should be removed and instead rely on native semantic elements like <ol>, <ul>, and <li>.

The dpub ARIA 1.1 working draft that you linked does mention that doc-endnote is deprecated, but it doesn't seem to mention the other roles (doc-backlink, doc-endnotes, and doc-noteref) as being deprecated at all.

The ARIA validator extension hasn't been updated since 2014, and it's code.google.com repo links to a newer chrome extension, which itself is deprecated and links to lighthouse's accessibility audit. Given that dpub-aria was first released in 2016, I don't think the aria validator extension would know about these roles, and would incorrectly mark them as "not existing".

Removing doc-endnote would be simple, but I'm personally not sure how it's currently being used by accessibility technologies, and when it's deprecation would change from being a working draft to a W3C recommendation.

[ThomasOwens]

I'm curious if there's any update to this. It doesn't appear to be a huge impact, but it is being flagged for accessibility. From what I can understand, there are now two ways to handle endnotes.

In one approach, there is a <div> or <section> with the role="doc-endnotes" aria-labelledby="note-hd" attributes. Within this section, there is an <ol>, where each <li> has an ID corresponding to the identifier for the note. From what I can gather, this approach is mostly implemented in the Kramdown output. The role="doc-endnote" should be removed from the <li>s and everything else would be satisfied.

However, there's also an incompatible role involved in the link to the footnote. The role="doc-noteref" should be applied to the <a> tag and not the <sup> tag.

I believe these two changes will bring Kramdown to conform to scanning tools. But what I don't know is how well assistive technologies have implemented the recommendations.