In Safari Version 13.0.5 (15608.5.11) with VoiceOver Version 10 (708.5.7), listbox options using aria-labelledby to refer to a descendant element announce as "text." Listbox options using both aria-labelledby and aria-describedby to refer to descendant elements announce only the aria-describedby content. Menu menuitems seem to announce correctly. Chrome exhibits the correct behavior. See https://codepen.io/mijordan/pen/NWqBqOV for a test case.
<rdar://problem/60633567>
Note that Safari dev tools correctly reports the accessibility name, yet VoiceOver is reading it incorrectly.
Note that the accessibility name is also not announced with aria-label on the option element.
In macOS 14.0, the aria-describedby attribute is now transmuted to AXCustomContent by default and is included in the output. There is a minor VO issue where only the label of the custom content is output. We'll be making this fix on the VoiceOver side, so we won't get another change on WebKit side for this issue
We believe this issue is resolved in the VoiceOver shipping in current macOS and iOS releases.