The ARIA spec says that a "row" role should compute it's accessible name from contents. See https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#row
Currently we don't do this because of performance and memory usage reasons. The concern is that very large tables would be too expensive. Unfortunately, this breaks treegrids, which often focus a row. Users need to hear the contents of those rows on focus.
A pragmatic middle ground is to compute the name when the row is focusable, either via actual focus (tabindex is set) or aria-activedescendant on the parent.
Comment 1 by bugdroid1@chromium.org
, Apr 10 2017