NVDA does not allow activating links that embed off-screen text in Firefox

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Reported by vtsaran on 2010-08-02 00:42
With the following code in place (extracted from http://finance.yahoo.com/news)

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where the text inside the tag is positioned off-screen and is shown when the link gains keyboard focus, NVDA does not allow activating such a link with an ENTER or a SPACE bar key.
Interestingly enough, performing an accDoDefaultAction by pressing NVDA+NUM_ENTER activates the link fine.
This is tested with Firefox 3.6.8. The same code works great in IE8.

To repro:

1. Open http://finance.yahoo.com/news.
2. Pick an H3 heading called "Investing Ideas & Strategies" as an example.
   The link in question is the "close category" link.

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Comment 2 by jteh on 2010-08-02 00:55
The problem here is that we try to activate the deepest node for greatest accuracy and correct handling of clickables, which in this case is the span. In Firefox, unless the node is actually clickable, we can't click it programmatically, so we have to move the mouse cursor to it and click. Unfortunately, this doesn't work at all for off-screen nodes. I need to think on a solution for this.

Out of interest, why is there an off-screen span in that link at all? The title attribute should be enough to provide suitable text for the link. This is a case we might see elsewhere in the wild, so we should fix it, but it seems like strange authoring to have an on-screen link with off-screen embedded text.

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Comment 3 by vtsaran (in reply to comment 2) on 2010-08-02 01:08
Replying to jteh:

Out of interest, why is there an off-screen span in that link at all? The title attribute should be enough to provide suitable text for the link. This is a case we might see elsewhere in the wild, so we should fix it, but it seems like strange authoring to have an on-screen link with off-screen embedded text.

I believe if the inner text was left empty, NVDA would not read the TITLE at all, unless queried with an NVDA+TAB key.
Also, the reason there is an off-screen text node is because the "close" symbol is indicated by a background image and ultimately does not require an onscreen text.

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Comment 4 by jteh on 2011-02-22 23:53
I forgot about this and filed duplicate #978. See #978 for a test case and more technical detail.
Changes:
Milestone changed from None to near-term

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Comment 5 by mdcurran on 2011-05-31 00:26
Fixed in 3b8bb2a.
Changes:
State: closed

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Comment 6 by jteh on 2011-05-31 00:54
Changes:
Milestone changed from near-term to 2011.2