描述
MDN URL
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/aside
What specific section or headline is this issue about?
No response
What information was incorrect, unhelpful, or incomplete?
The overall guidance and examples for <aside> appear to use this element incorrectly. The following are specific areas of confusion:
Asides are frequently presented as sidebars or call-out boxes.
An accessibility usage section is missing entirely.
What did you expect to see?
I stumbled across an article on <aside> and accessibility from TemperTemper and they make a very good point that's undocumented on the MDN page and HTML spec, which is that elements with a role="complementary" are disabled for assistive devices if nested inside an element with another role defined. This is further documented on Deque's documentation.
Additionally, I checked to see if MDN's page for the complementary role included this information and it's lacking there as well.
It would be great to see an explicit section on both of these MDN pages calling out this behavior. As it's currently written, folks are assuming <aside> is fine to use as an alternative <blockquote> tag and this appears to be incorrect and possibly harmful to screen readers.
Do you have any supporting links, references, or citations?
No response
Do you have anything more you want to share?
No response
MDN metadata
- Folder:
en-us/web/html/reference/elements/aside - MDN URL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/aside
- GitHub URL: https://github.com/mdn/content/blob/main/files/en-us/web/html/reference/elements/aside/index.md
- Last commit: https://github.com/mdn/content/commit/0754cd805a8e010d2e3a2a065f634a3bcf358252
- Document last modified: 2025-07-09T21:49:04.000Z