From @klown on February 1, 2016 15:34

@cyns

This example from the HTML5 spec has the datalist providing values for the range control, but having no UI of its own ...

FWIW: If I load that markup into FF, Safari, or Chrome, it's a slider. Also, FF and Safari expose it as a slider in the a11y tree.

The html-aam maps <input type="range" ...> to the ARIA slider role:
http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/html-aam/html-aam.html#el-input-range

The datalist/option is used by Chrome to create tick marks for the 0, -30, and 30 values, which are three of the option/values called out in the datalist. However, I don't see anything corresponding to these ticks in AAPIs,. I don't think any AAPI provides specific support for them.

From @cyns on February 5, 2016 23:24

@klown
How about text change to the mapping to aria to something like
When datalist is the target of a for attribute on an input of type text, email, [rest of the list], maps to the aria role listbox. When datalist is the target of the for attribute on an input of type range, not mapped. [other cases if there are any]

From @klown on February 8, 2016 14:35

@cyns
That sounds okay.

But, other than exploring a datalist for a input type="range", I personally don't know all the combinations of input and datalist, and the resulting GUI. Others who know more, need to vet this.

From @cyns on February 9, 2016 22:49

@stevefaulkner are there other use cases for datalist besides an edit/combobox and a slider?

I added 'no mapped if not linked with a proper input control' into comments section of datalist element mapping e9b1bfe