It's sometimes difficult to pick an aria role, because they are defined vaguely. Because an aria role is often used to define the purpose of a piece of an application, it often doesn't pin down what specifically the role is, the description hems and haws around the purpose, it provides the vague shape of a thing but not the specifics. Roles are by nature vague. For example, if a role=button were exactly the same as <button> it would actually be redundant, there would be no point in the role, we would just use <button>! So the role descriptions are often more vague.

This results in some difficulty: How do we know what roles to use? For example, try to avoid using role=button. Why? Because you should use actual <button>s, and the actual buttons get for free the role=button.

So then what roles are actually, pragmatically useful when otherwise using html5?

Well, as app authors, what we are often doing is setting priority. We aren't just creating one <div> among thousands, it's a <div role=region>. It's not just a <span>, it's a <span role=comment>.

So what roles are NOT given to us for free by a html5 element like and ( a role=link element), and work well for when we need to make generic elements more specific?

• role=region is a useful generic role to highlight an area
• role=alert applies to really high priority, transient things that come up and may go away after, things that elicit a response
• role=status for status updates, generally where the contents are going to update live
• role=comment for where it is people writing comment responses
• role=note for separated text

A huge majority of the remaining roles fall into two "try not to use" categories:

• Don't use these because the role comes for free from the semantic html5 element: role=button, role=figure, role=code, etc
• Abstract roles (they exist, but are not intended for use with authorship)

In Summary

I sorted through the aria roles trying to find 2023's most useful generic roles. For now, these are the most useful roles that I could find for authorship that aren't rendered redundant with other html5 builtins.