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 makes VO ignore these links completely. <a href="#"> </a> <a href="#" title="Close"> </a> Of course, these are arguably inaccessible controls to begin with, but the fact that the first examples without do receive focus would suggest that the links with should in fact also receive focus.
Just to confirm this behavior is also still present in iOS 9 current seed build
To clarify: iOS 9 seed build 13A4325c
<rdar://problem/22285408>
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.
I can corroborate Patrick's findings. In addition, unencoded whitespace and other space encodings like   work. This appears to be a bug with .
Confirmed. From a VO user's perspective this would be a worthwhile thing to fix.
At least for links, this now seems resolved in iOS11/Safari/VO. <a href="#"> </a> <a href="#" title="Close"> </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.
(In reply to Patrick H. Lauke from comment #7) > At least for links, this now seems resolved in iOS11/Safari/VO. > > <a href="#"> </a> > <a href="#" title="Close"> </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.