Bug 147881 – AX: VoiceOver/Safari does not allow focus on specific "empty links" (with  )

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: FIXED
• Component: Accessibility

[Patrick H. Lauke]

Created attachment 258718 [details]
Variations of links/spans with different attributes to test focusability

While VoiceOver/iOS (8.4) allows user to focus on

<a href="#"></a>
<a href="#" title="Close"></a>

adding a &nbsp; makes VO ignore these links completely.

<a href="#">&nbsp;</a>
<a href="#" title="Close">&nbsp;</a>

Of course, these are arguably inaccessible controls to begin with, but the fact that the first examples without &nbsp; do receive focus would suggest that the links with &nbsp; should in fact also receive focus.

[Patrick H. Lauke]

Just to confirm this behavior is also still present in iOS 9 current seed build

[Patrick H. Lauke]

To clarify: iOS 9 seed build 13A4325c

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/22285408>

[Patrick H. Lauke]

To be clear, the expected behavior and solution, at least in my opinion, would be to allow VO to set focus on links that contain a   the same way that completely empty links currently do.

[Heydon]

I can corroborate Patrick's findings. In addition, unencoded whitespace and other space encodings like   work. This appears to be a bug with  .

[Léonie Watson]

Confirmed. From a VO user's perspective this would be a worthwhile thing to fix.

[Patrick H. Lauke]

At least for links, this now seems resolved in iOS11/Safari/VO. 

<a href="#">&nbsp;</a>
<a href="#" title="Close">&nbsp;</a>

now receive VO focus, just the same way that 

<a href="#"></a>
<a href="#" title="Close"></a>

do. There's still an issue where pure spans with tabindex="0", like

<span tabindex="0" title="Close"></span>

don't receive VO focus....but I may file this separately.

[chris fleizach]

(In reply to Patrick H. Lauke from comment #7)
> At least for links, this now seems resolved in iOS11/Safari/VO. 
> 
> <a href="#">&nbsp;</a>
> <a href="#" title="Close">&nbsp;</a>
> 
> now receive VO focus, just the same way that 
> 
> <a href="#"></a>
> <a href="#" title="Close"></a>
> 
> do. There's still an issue where pure spans with tabindex="0", like
> 
> <span tabindex="0" title="Close"></span>

this could be remedied by adding a role="link"

> 
> don't receive VO focus....but I may file this separately.