The allowed roles for the iframe, embed and object elements are either not supported in multiple browsers, are exposed inconsistently or break the embedded content completely with common browser/assistive technology combinations. In particular:
- The presentation/none role is not supported on these elements by either Firefox or Chrome and this would be difficult (if not infeasible) to fix.
- These elements are focusable, so it can't be presentational.
-Firefox at least needs this Accessible in the tree because it bridges between the inner and outer documents.
- For these two reasons, Firefox ignores presentation/none on these elements altogether.
- Chrome continues to expose the element, but gives it a role of group. I assume (but haven't verified) that this is due to similar implementation concerns to Firefox.
- According to the ARIA spec, the img role should make children presentational, but neither Firefox or Chrome support this. The document continues to be exposed within the img.
- The document role on these elements makes the embedded content invisible to Firefox + NVDA.
Some of these issues might be fixable in specs/browsers/ATs, while others might not. Either way, the current situation is pretty broken.
Given these issues and considering that authors may be relying on conformance tools implementing this specification to determine whether their code is accessible, I think that no ARIA roles should be allowed on these elements at this point. Of course, this guidance could be reinstated if/when these issues are addressed.
The allowed roles for the iframe, embed and object elements are either not supported in multiple browsers, are exposed inconsistently or break the embedded content completely with common browser/assistive technology combinations. In particular:
-Firefox at least needs this Accessible in the tree because it bridges between the inner and outer documents.
Some of these issues might be fixable in specs/browsers/ATs, while others might not. Either way, the current situation is pretty broken.
Given these issues and considering that authors may be relying on conformance tools implementing this specification to determine whether their code is accessible, I think that no ARIA roles should be allowed on these elements at this point. Of course, this guidance could be reinstated if/when these issues are addressed.