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Twitter thread about “presentational list heuristics” by James Craig. The whole thing is worth a read, but here are the highlights:

• There used to be a problem with too many lists for assistive tech users: “all I hear when reading news sites is ‘list, two items … end of list, list 4 items…’ and I don’t care about all the lists.”
• This was caused by developers marking too much content up as lists, even when not appropriate.
• Therefore, WebKit now applies some heuristics to these lists, to decide whether or not to expose the list semantics to the accessibility tree.
• It considers whether the list has any bullet points. After all, if a sighted user doesn’t need to know it’s a list, then why should a screen reader user?
• Similar principles are applied to table markup, which was regularly used for layouts in the early web.
• “Many people think it’s only display: none; and visibility: hidden; but dozens, if not hundreds, of style characteristics contribute [to computing the accessibility tree].”
• False positives are extremely rare. That said, developers can force the list semantics to be obeyed by applying role="list" to the <ul>/<ol>.

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