After doing research about the support of separator and slider roles across different screen readers and platforms it became obvious that the slider role has much better narration and keyboard support.
While separator fits the use case the best on paper, in real-world it's support leaves much to be desired.
To summarize the issues with separator:
aria-label not supported on VoiceOver on Mac for separator
VO keys not working for separator
current value (aria-valuetext) not being narrated in Jaws
no mode auto switching in NVDA and Jaws, hindering the experience.
All of these issues are avoided by using slider.
"Horizontal" and "vertical" orientation needs to be flipped for "slider".
After doing research about the support of
separatorandsliderroles across different screen readers and platforms it became obvious that the slider role has much better narration and keyboard support.While
separatorfits the use case the best on paper, in real-world it's support leaves much to be desired.To summarize the issues with
separator:separatorseparatorAll of these issues are avoided by using
slider."Horizontal" and "vertical" orientation needs to be flipped for "slider".