@chriscoyier
Safari treats (most) lists without bullets as not-lists after complaints from screen reader users that too many sites used the elements too often. The site developers had come down with "listitis," they saw any set of items as a list, regardless of how it was styled. This was compounded by the fact that VoiceOver is more verbose about lists than other screen readers.
Adding role="list" is saying, "no really, this is a list" and negating Safari's heuristics. Doing so should be done with care, asking "will users by helped by knowing how many items there are and what their position is as they navigate through them?" (Ask this of a hypothetical persona in your head or even better, ask in screen reader user testing.)
If a list uses pseudo-elements instead of the usual markers, maybe adding the explicit role is a good idea. If a list is a set of keyword tag links with display: inline and no markers, maybe not.
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