Re: text role removal

> On Jun 23, 2016, at 1:54 PM, Matt King <a11ythinker@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> As I recall, the fundamental objections were related to both the utility and
> the risks of the role. In all the use cases that were presented, all the
> screen reader users in the working group were in agreement that the text
> role did not provide better accessibility than the image role. In every use
> case we examined, either the text role was hiding something that was useful
> or the image role was as good or even better fit.

Since the text role has been implemented in a few browsers for a couple years, people are already using this on a number of sites, including some big ones like the iTunes Media Stores. 

A few of the other uses you may not have considered:

Ratings are done this way so that the text "★★★☆☆" can be spoken as "3 of 5 stars" rather than the unicode literals "black star, black star, black star, white star, white star"... The markup is something like <span role="text" aria-label="3 of 5 stars">★★★☆☆</span>
People are occasionally using this to purposefully flatten a few semantic elements that would otherwise be redundant for screen readers (e.g. the implementation required redundant links for styling or functionality, only one of which is relevant for AT.) This is like an ad-hoc was to trigger "children presentational"-like functionality. Something like <a href="#"><span role="text">multiple objects and click handlers in here, treated as one "children presentational" link</span></a>

You can test these examples in any recent version of Safari or Chrome. Both have shipped the text role since 2014.

> There were also questions surrounding what should happen with selection for
> copy and paste and how AT could access appropriate context actions.

Those related-but-separate issues were discussed in the 2014 Face-to-Face and were determined to be puntable to ARIA 2.0.