ARIA in HTML was updated today to clarify that when a label element is not associated with a labelable element, that authors may specify ARIA roles and aria-* attributes applicable to the specified role.

A reduced test case was created to demonstrate the updated allowances.

This change is being made because for the use case of a label element being used and not associated with a labelable element, there's no draw backs to allowing ARIA attributes to being defined. But, if the label element is implicitly or explicitly associated with a labelable element, assigning ARIA attributes can resulted in invalid nesting of roles, or can break the naming association, resulting in the labeled element no longer having an accessible name.