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Mysterious Bug

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From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Sep 16, 2011 8:12AM


We have run into an interesting bug and are wondering if anyone else has encountered it. It has to do with hiding region landmarks in Internet Explorer 8. IN this situation, we were using the most current version of JAWS, though my colleague reports that she had the same results with NVDA.

With all these examples, assume that the "hidden" class is set up like this:
.hidden {
Display: none;
}

If you have html like this...

<body>
<h1>Example of a Hidden Region Landmark</h1>
<div role="region" title="Example" class="hidden">
<p>This is an example.</p>
</div>
</body>
JAWS will read the heading, but ignore the region landmark and its contents-just what you think it should do.

However, if you do something like this...
<body>
<h1>Example of a Hidden Region Landmark</h1>
<div role="region" title="Example" class="hidden">
<p>This is an example.</p>
</div>
<div role="region" title="Second Example">
<p>This is the second example.</p>
</div>
</body>
JAWS will now read the first region landmark though it will not read any of the contents-exactly what I do not want it to do.

Basically, the behavior seems to be that a hidden region landmark will only be ignored if it is the last child of the body element.

Has anyone else run into this behavior? We do not see this in FireFox. Unfortunately, we can't test with IE9 at the moment.

Thanks,
Tim