RE: role="list", Safari and VoiceOver

Designers and/or developers decide not to show bullets for reasons of
desired looks. Some do it simply because they just don't like or want the
look of bullets.

So it is nothing to do with whether the thing is really a list of not, and
I think it is wrong for Apple to just decide arbitrarily that a list should
not be announced simply because of a no-bullets visual styling.

However, there is one very common case that I often see but is undoubtedly
quite wrong. That's when developers put a single item in a <ul> list! (I
don't mean simply when a search, for instance, just happens to find 1
result occasionally - that is arguably reasonable, to stay consistent with
when several results are found.) I mean when developers just do it for some
reason best known to themselves, and I have never found out why they do it!
Is there some framework that puts single items in a list? I raise it as a
1.3.1 issue because the visual presentation is not that of a list, so
should not be conveyed programmatically as a list!

As to whether lists are over-used or not, that is an interesting question.
For instance, a couple of links or buttons beside each other - maybe two
Previous and Next buttons. Should they be announced as list? - probably not.

A row of cards (the pattern of an image over a heading link over a
paragraph of text) - should they be a list? I have always assumed it will
help screen reader users to know how many of them there are up front so I
advise putting them in a list. (If there's lots, the screen reader user
might want to hit the H key to skip to the next heading rather than
navigate through them!)

This question of (possibly) over-using lists is a case where I would like
to see views from actual screen reader users (lots of views, not just 2 or
3, perhaps from a survey, and from ordinary users, not ones who are also
accessibility experts as it's what ordinary users think here that is
important.