WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Off-screen form label not read by Screen reader

for

From: John Foliot
Date: Aug 2, 2012 12:16PM


Jared Smith wrote:
>
> Once the code issues were fixed, I still experienced the same behavior
> in NVDA and Firefox of the hidden label not being read (though the
> ARIA label is correctly read). In debugging I found that this is due
> to the use of the overflow:hidden style. When this style is removed,
> the labels read appropriately. This is most certainly a bug because
> overflow should have no bearing on whether content is read. Of note is
> that the labels do read correctly in NVDA with IE, so it may be a
> Firefox issue rather than NVDA.
>
> This style is a standard part of most off-screen text styles. We've
> recommended using it for about a decade
> (http://webaim.org/techniques/css/invisiblecontent/) and I found in my
> last code search that these exact styles were being used in many 10's
> of thousands of web sites.

Coming late to this discussion, if this is indeed a bug in Firefox then it
should be reported to them as such. While I lack the cycles personally to do
so, if either you Jared, or Nawaz want to take that on, it would be
beneficial to all. I am copying David Bolter from Mozilla on this note, as
hopefully he can either indicate that this is a logged (known) bug, or
provide some gentle assistance to get this bug filed.

Cheers!

JF


Maraikayar Prem Nawaz
> Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2012 3:58 AM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: [WebAIM] Off-screen form label not read by Screen reader
>
> Hi,
> I have a simple form where I have off-screen labels
> Example here : http://jsfiddle.net/HMDpw/
>
> It didn't work with NVDA on FireFox (FF14) . The form fields are read
> as
> "Edit Auto complete Blank"
> Not sure if this is problem with the code /browser/ NVDA..
> Anyhelp would be great
>
> Thanks
> -Nawaz