Improvements for the pagination links semantics #3
Description
The pagination links should be rendered with proper semantic markup to be correctly exposed to assistive technologies and correctly announced to users.
Disabled links are currently rendered as:
<a class="tablenav-pages-navspan"> ...
Since they're not links, they should be rendered as <span> elements as WordPress currently does, for example:
<span class="tablenav-pages-navspan" aria-hidden="true">«</span>
They should also "look" disabled.
Enabled links are currently rendered as
<a class="next-page"><span class="screen-reader-text">Next page</span><span aria-hidden="true">›</span></a>
however, they're not real links: they don't point to a resource, instead they perform an action thus they should be button elements. This is important not just for the sake of semantics, but also to allow assistive technologies to report them correctly to users: links should be links, buttons should be buttons.
The WP accessibility standards try to recap the decision logic for these cases, see https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/best-practices/coding-standards/accessibility-coding-standards/#semantics-for-controls