ARIA property
aria-roledescription
Replaces the spoken name of the role with your own wording. Use sparingly, and never to rename a standard control.
It replaces the role name people hear, so a slide rotator can announce as carousel instead of as group. What it does not change is behaviour, keyboard support, or how the element is treated by anything else on the page.
Which roles may carry aria-roledescription
- Value
- string
- Filed as
- A property, which is how ARIA files it and not a rule about how often it changes.
- Roles that may carry it
- Any role. This one is global, which is why no individual role lists it.
Global means no role has to grant permission for it. There is one more place to check, because ARIA in HTML sets rules per element as well as per role, and it allows no aria-* attributes at all on a datalist or on the html element. Past that, the way a global attribute goes wrong is rarely where it sits. It is whether it is still true, which is the next section.
Every role above comes from the specification's own list for this attribute, checked name for name. The normative definition stays with the W3C, in the aria-roledescription section of the ARIA specification.
Keeping aria-roledescription true
Because it swaps a word everybody already knows for one only you know, the wording is the whole risk, and renaming a button to something friendlier takes away a term the person has spent years learning to trust. There are three cases where the value is thrown away entirely and none of them warns you. An invalid role, an element with no implicit role of its own, and a value that is empty or only whitespace. So a bare div carrying aria-roledescription of carousel and no role at all does nothing, which is how most of these get written. Give the element a real role first, then decide whether renaming it still earns its place.
How aria-roledescription gets checked
There are test rules that check an ARIA attribute is one that exists, is allowed on the role underneath it, and carries a value of the right type. What they map to is ARIA's own author requirements rather than any WCAG criterion, so a misplaced attribute breaks ARIA without being a WCAG failure by itself. It becomes one under 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value the moment the missing or wrong value means the control's state cannot be worked out programmatically, which is what usually happens next.
Nothing automated catches the failure this page is about. A stale value is a valid value, on a permitted role, with the right type. It is only wrong about the world.
Attributes you will meet alongside aria-roledescription
- aria-atomic Whether an update should be read whole, or only the part that changed.
- aria-busy Says a region is still being updated, so wait before announcing it.
- aria-controls Points at what this control operates. A combobox has to say what it opens.
- aria-current Marks the one item in a set that represents the here and now, such as the current page in a nav.
- aria-describedby Points at further description, read after the name. Hints and error text usually go here.
- aria-details Points at richer explanation elsewhere in the page, which people can navigate to rather than have read out.
- aria-flowto Overrides reading order by pointing at what should be read next. Rarely the right answer.
- aria-hidden Removes an element from the accessibility tree while leaving it on screen.
Every ARIA state and property · Every ARIA role · ARIA explained