Just use a button

> This element does not announce itself as an interactive element to screen reader users.

Is this actually true nowadays? Given that advice like this is often parrotted by people who don't actually use screen-reading software, I sometimes wonder if this is a situation where we've just been saying this and repeating this advice; meanwhile, screen readers have obviously become sophisticated enough to recognize that a div with an onclick handler on it is probably, you know, clickable and interactive.

Have you tested this? Often click handlers are on some non-interactive ancestor element, it is not a good heuristic for something being interactive itself or what name it should have. Sometimes the listener is on the body element and we just parse out the triggering element and do something.

Screen reading software seems like it would have a very small market and I would expect it lags rather than keeps up with the ever changing ways people invent to build web pages.

Screen readers have and continue to lag in implementing standards designed specifically for accessibility, so I would say they are obviously not sophisticated enough.

(One example: https://heydonworks.com/article/aria-controls-is-poop)

There are well-defined standards for how the role of every element is determined, and according to those standards, adding an onclick handler does not change the role.

Screen readers also don't access the DOM directly, there's an extra abstraction layer. Browsers expose accessibility data to the appropriate OS API, and screen readers use the data exposed by the OS. There's too much variation as-is between different screen readers to be piling browser-specific behavior on top.

No I haven't tested it, that's what I'm asking.

This piece of advice, to me, just feels like a piece of advice constantly repeated by a bunch of people, none of whom actually use the software for which the piece of advice is meant to benefit. That scares me; like we've all lost touch with the ground truth on this one; I'd love to re-sync with it, that's what I'm trying to do, I just don't have the first clue how to do it.

Maybe. But, again, these are all hypothetical ideas. Its been over 24 hours, and despite getting multiple responses, none of them are of the form: "I have used ScreenReaderSoftwareX, and on the latest version it does not interpret divs with an onclick handler has an interactable entity even though it is".