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Re: Opacity Zero and Screen Readers

for

From: Lovely, Brian (CONT)
Date: Jul 19, 2016 9:31AM

Thanks, Patrick!

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Patrick H. Lauke
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 11:27 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Opacity Zero and Screen Readers

On 19/07/2016 16:12, Lovely, Brian (CONT) wrote:
> 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.

The actual behavior is inconsistent across browser/AT combinations. I seem to remember that opacity usually makes no difference, but that visibility:hidden in most cases hides the content. But it's not something that should be relied on (or at least something that should be thoroughly tested across multiple browser/AT combinations before being used in production).

See http://juicystudio.com/article/screen-readers-display-none.php,
http://webaim.org/techniques/css/invisiblecontent/,
https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2016/01/the-state-of-hidden-content-support-in-2016/

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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