These patterns look familiar to me, having retrofitted a functional, though poorly architected AngularJS app for WCAG compliance. Would it have looked better if

These patterns look familiar to me, having retrofitted a functional, though poorly architected AngularJS app for WCAG compliance. Would it have looked better if from the beginning semantic HTML were used? Sure. But does the aria- and role- soup improve the functionality and usability for non-typical users with little impact on maintainability? You bet.