This theme is not friendly to the Screenreaders (no WAI-ARIA support)

Hello, I am new in this forum and I am trying out the page builder framework.
It feels to me that this theme is geared towards developers according to the content on the main site. By the looks of it this theme has some advanced options that other themes don’t, that said however it does not employ the very important practices to ensure accessibility for people with disabilities.
I am talking about ARIA accessibility standards.

The reason I know this because I am using screenreader myself every day. I tested the basic form of this theme without plug-ins involved, because I was interested whether the menu is accessible to screenreaders. In the short answer to that is no,
wordpress themes 2021 and 2020 has this nailed perfectly and it was brilliant. As we know though they’re not very customizable, and I need more features than that, so I can’t use their themes even though the navigation menus are perfectly accessible.

basically this theme and plenty other themes do not have implemented the navigation states of the menu and keyboard control options properly.For example I can access the navigation bar with the screen reader without a problem, however if the menu element has a submenu I can’t read it properly if the Aria is not implemented properly.
For example if code doesn’t have this working properly I don’t know whether the menu element has the submenu or not, even if I do I can’t collapse it because it doesn’t work with keyboard very well.

I’m really curious to know whether the developers of the theme would be willing to fix such issues if I report them properly, because I can provide such feedback, but I will not do that until I get the green signal as I say, because I can describe all the problems and issues, but if I’m not getting a fix I would just waste my time.
The reason I’m saying that is because I reported many issues before, I always ask 1st before I do that now, so I don’t waste my time doing so.

All the major websites I am talking about bigger ones in particular has this implemented properly. I think it is important if you’re calling yourself a good framework, and developer orientated, you need to fix this there is just no way around it. And I would like to get this theme on my websites I am running, because I want to ensure accessibility to my users.

it’s not as hard to do it there is only few things to fix actually not the entire platform / theme , it may look that way because the requirements list is long, but html5 and js has accessibility by itself implemented quite well, so the only fix it actually needs more often than not is describing the states and enabling the keyboard navigation properly.

I found very useful resource actually that talks about this, particularly the accessible navigation, hence I am interested at this part of the most. Navigation menus are usually the biggest troubles for the websites I found over the years of experience as a screenreader user, and I can talk about this because I do understand how accessible websites works and what the elements are.

The post below explains quite well how to implement ARIA into the navigation menus, I tried to implement that in the other themes myself, but I got out of luck a little bit.
https://codeable.io/wordpress-accessibility-creating-accessible-dropdown-menus/

Some more information about accessible navigation in general
https://w3c.github.io/aria-practices/examples/menubar/menubar-navigation.html

I will paste some content about this so whomever is reading this can read about it a bit more.

WAI-ARIA provides a framework for adding attributes to identify features for user interaction, how they relate to each other, and their current state. WAI-ARIA describes navigation techniques to mark regions and common Web structures as menus, primary content, secondary content, banner information, and other types of Web structures. For example, with WAI-ARIA, developers can identify regions of pages and enable keyboard users to easily move among regions, rather than having to press Tab many times.

WAI-ARIA also includes technologies to map controls, live regions, and events to accessibility application programming interfaces (APIs), including custom controls used for rich Internet applications. WAI-ARIA techniques apply to widgets such as buttons, drop-down lists, calendar functions, tree controls (for example, expandable menus), and others.
WAI-ARIA provides Web authors with the following:
? Roles to describe the type of widget presented, such as “menu”, “treeitem”, “slider”, and “progressbar”
? Roles to describe the structure of the Web page, such as headings, regions, and tables (grids)
? Properties to describe the state widgets are in, such as “checked” for a check box, or “haspopup” for a menu.
? Properties to define live regions of a page that are likely to get updates (such as stock quotes), as well as an interruption policy for those updates—for example, critical updates may be presented in an alert dialog box, and incidental updates occur within the page
? A way to provide keyboard navigation for the Web objects and events, such as those mentioned above
Versions
?
WAI-ARIA 1.0 was published as a completed W3C Recommendation on 20 March 2014.
?
WAI-ARIA 1.1 was published as a completed W3C Recommendation on 14 December 2017.
?
WAI-ARIA 1.2 is under development.

So that was a long read no doubt about it, but is important to explain yourself well, and also because I am visually impaired myself and I am using a screenreader I have to explain this to developers all the time.
Also sooner or later developers will need to fix that, because at this time it’s just nonsense how people are unaware of this issue. Americans disability act I think will press even more on this later on, so developers will have to fix that because there were lots of blind and vision impaired users actually.

So with all that said, I hope this will not be ignored and we can proceed with this somewhere.
Thank you
best regards
Vytautas