Pagination accessibility

I ran through the pagination with NVDA screen reader and I would like to do some changes:

1. I am passing parameter to pagination so we can tell if it use to paginate pages or comments (it could be confusing to just say page 2 when user is on comments)
2. added some aria-labels. This is different across screen readers. NVDA is using it when going through the page using keyboard. It's ignoring it on span element ("Current page") but for example VoiceOver is getting it.
3. I decided to remove pagination from list (ol). It's not really adding any semantic value in this case and some screen readers are then reading some stuff that is not important before actually getting to the pagination ("List, x list items etc) This approach was recommended by Reinhard Stebner and I agree (after trying to use NVDA) that it is a little bit more straightforward. And it is removing some `li` elements in the process which is nice.
does this need tabindex? (`a`s are tabbable)