ARIA-haspopup is used to indicate the presence of submenus and context menus on the web page. In general aria-haspopup property is used with links and buttons. Though it sounds like haspopup need to be used for dialog boxes, popup windows, ARIA 1.0 specification recommends use of aria-haspopup property for submenus and context menus. Different assistive technologies react differently with the use of aria-haspopup property.
NVDA is consistent and more relevant with WAI ARIA recommendation . NVDA announces the term ‘submenu’ along with link or button when aria-haspopup is used. This is same with Mozilla Firefox and Internet explorer. On Google Chrome NVDA also announces expanded along with submenu.
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JAWS announces “haspopup” with links and “menu” along with buttons. This is observed in Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. Similar to NVDA , JAWS also announces “Expanded” along with the menu on Google Chrome.
Safari on IOS 8 does not recognize aria-haspopup property when used with links but announces “popup” when used with button.
Slightly deviating from the topic, I often use to think even after having technologies like ARIA, sometimes we use offscreen content to announce link that opens a new browser window (target=”_blank”), indicating a link that navigate to external website etc. On similar lines a bug has been raised with W3C, to include aria-poptype attribute having defined keywords such as “window”, “dialog” etc. Allow authors to declare type of popup from the triggering element: menu, dialog, etc. describes the details of the bug. Hope to have a more powerful poptype attribute in a future release of WAI ARIA.