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Accessibility fix guide

Invalid ARIA Role or Attribute

Elements use invalid ARIA roles or attributes, which can confuse assistive technologies and make content inaccessible.

Issue ID: A11Y-ARIA-INVALID-001
Severity: major
Impact: High
Effort: S

Use this article when

  • You need deeper remediation guidance than the issue card can show.
  • You want CMS-specific steps before handing the fix to a developer.
  • You want a repeatable re-check path after shipping the change.
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What this issue is

Elements use invalid ARIA roles or attributes, which can confuse assistive technologies and make content inaccessible.

Why it matters

Elements use invalid ARIA roles or attributes, which can confuse assistive technologies and make content inaccessible. This affects usability, compliance risk, and how many visitors can successfully consume the page.

How we detect it

  • FreeSiteAudit flags this issue when the rule for A11Y-ARIA-INVALID-001 fails and the page evidence points to Dom body.
  • You can usually confirm this by checking the page source or the relevant page settings inside your CMS.

Evidence examples

Check the affected page source, rendered output, or relevant CMS setting to confirm the missing or incorrect element.

How to fix it

  1. 1Use valid ARIA roles from the WAI-ARIA specification
  2. 2Ensure ARIA attributes match their allowed values
  3. 3Prefer native HTML semantics over ARIA when possible

How to re-check it

  • Run axe-core and confirm no invalid ARIA violations

Related tools

This issue is best verified with the full FreeSiteAudit crawl rather than a single-point mini tool.