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Text concatenation fault with Chrome and the "clip" technique for hiding text

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From: Steve Green
Date: Mar 26, 2020 8:03PM

I have just encountered a weird issue with hidden text, which I have never seen before. These days we recommend using the "clip" technique to hide text rather than hiding it off-screen, because it works with both LTR and RTL languages. However, with JAWS 2019 and 2020 and Chrome, I am getting concatenation of the hidden and visible words, which is causing mispronunciation.

This does not occur with Firefox, Internet Explorer or the old version of Edge, but it does occur with the new version of Edge based on Chromium.

I have created a test page at http://tpl1.com/hidden_text.htm if anyone wants to take a look.

You can hear the mispronunciation easily enough, but you can also check by reading word by word or letter by letter. There appears to be no space character between the concatenated words, even though there are spaces in the source code.

The "solution" is to remove the "position:absolute" style rule, but the layout then breaks, which means we can't do that.

Has anyone else encountered this, and does anyone have a solution? Has this always happened or has something changed in Chrome? I may be wrong, but I don't think this is a JAWS bug because it only happens in Chromium-based browsers.

I have seen several variants of the "clip" technique and I tested my test page with a couple of them. In both cases the only thing that made a difference was the "position:absolute" style rule, so I expect that will be the case with all the variants.

Regards,
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd
020 3002 4176 (direct)
0800 612 2780 (switchboard)
07957 246 276 (mobile)
020 7692 5517 (fax)
Skype: testpartners
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www.testpartners.co.uk
 
Connect to me on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/stevegreen2