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Question on using <span withing an <a href in main navigation...

for

From: Nancy Johnson
Date: Sep 15, 2015 12:22PM

We have some legacy sites and In the main navigation there are 5 links..
The main navigation is designated with a background image that is an
image sprite.

The 5 links have a <span with the text within the links that uses
'visibilty:hidden" . his has been since 2009.. I have also used
it in other places accommodate the many updates to the header.

Today when I was testing with a screen reader,
NVDA 2014.3 / Firefox 40.0.3 doesn't read the text in the
span..instead read the link.
NVDA 2014.3 and Chrome 45.0.2454.85 read the text within the span.

I didn't try IE10 or IE11.

Is the nature of visiblity:hidden changing? Should I use the standared
code used in Skip nav? 1000 px off the pages or would one of the aria
work?

I believe this code is similar to this 11 year old article and the
code was given to us
http://alistapart.com/article/imagemap

Thanks
Nancy