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Re: Opacity Zero and Screen Readers

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From: Lovely, Brian (CONT)
Date: Jul 19, 2016 9:12AM

So the answer is "yes"? During a previous assessment, I had an element that the developer had really, really tried to hide. It was set to visibility:hidden, opacity:0, and was positioned offscreen. I set visibility to visible in order to see what the screen reader would announce when it was able to detect the element. I didn't hear anything, but then set the opacity to 1 and was then able to hear the element announced. As this was not a very exhaustive test, I wasn't sure if this was just a fluke situation or not.

When I asked the question of the group, I was trying to test a carousel that very zealous developers had set all kinds of aria roles and properties on. The carousel ran automatically, and it was very difficult to try setting and/or resetting various properties, so I reached out for that particular answer.