Clarify that role="button" does not inherit button functionality#43186
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hamishwillee merged 3 commits intomdn:mainfrom Feb 23, 2026
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Key motivation here was a teammate was interpreting this as a role you add to an item you want tab focusable that does not have any mouse/keyboard interaction from a user.
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files/en-us/web/accessibility/aria/reference/roles/button_role/index.md
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Thanks very much @abelmark , and welcome to MDN.
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* upstream/main: (619 commits) Fix usage of numbers iterator in zip example (mdn#43236) Synchronize with BCD v7.3.3 (mdn#43178) Add Firefox 148 sanitizer release note (mdn#43234) WebDriver conformance changes for Firefox 148 (mdn#43228) ci(auto-merge): fix target-repo (mdn#43139) Add session mgt guide (mdn#42908) docs(firefox-release): Finalize release notes for Fx148 release (mdn#43225) [Technical Review] Add folder for WebDriver BiDi and create initial landing pages (mdn#43153) fix: correct 'after' to 'before' in break-before always/all descriptions (mdn#43185) added the release note for position-try-order (mdn#43223) Clarify that role="button" does not inherit button functionality (mdn#43186) Fix wording mistake in Temporal.ZonedDateTime (mdn#43188) Fix description for break-before: always (mdn#43190) improve confusing sentance (mdn#43172) Document scoped customElementRegistry and related properties (mdn#43149) fix: correct terminology for object initializer property names (mdn#43182) Fix typo about arrow function expression body (mdn#43175) Update InterfaceData based on WebRef (mdn#43179) Fix clarify visibilitychange event intro to mention all triggers (mdn#43177) [WebExtensions] Document runtime.getVersion() method (mdn#42971) ...
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…#43186) * Clarify that role="button" does not inherit button functionality * Replace the term "inherit" as it added semanatics that were not needed --------- Co-authored-by: Mark Abel <markabel@MacBook-Pro.local>
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Description
Clarifies the summary and description paragraphs of the
buttonrole page to make explicit thatrole="button"does not inherit any native button functionality — event listeners and keyboard handling must be added manually.Motivation
The original wording ("provides no button functionality") was ambiguous. It could be read as saying a button with this role has no useful functionality at all, rather than conveying that the role only affects how assistive technology announces the element. The updated wording makes clear that the semantic role is communicated to screen readers, but the interactive behavior (event listeners, keyboard handling) is not inherited and must be implemented by the developer.
Additional details
The change is applied to both the opening summary sentence and the equivalent sentence in the Description section.
Related issues and pull requests
N/A