NVDA does not always read off-screen content on web pages

[vtsaran]

NVDA does not always read off-screen content on web pages.
To repro:
1. Go to mail.yahoo.com and login with your username/passwd.
2. If you are not automatically transfered to the classic version, click on the "Classic Mail" link at the top of the page.
3. Display the list of messages in your inbox by either choosing "check mail" or pressing ALT+SHIFT+2 if using Firefox.
4. Right underneath the checkbox that allows the user to select a message there is a link that allows to either flag the message or clear the flag for a previously-flagged message.
This link has an off-screen text that either says "flag this message" or "clear the flag".
NVDA totally ignores this text where other screen readers don't.

[benjaminhawkeslewis]

As far as I can tell this is not text positioned off-screen with CSS, but rather a TITLE attribute on an empty A element with HREF (the visible content being provided, to some users, with background-image). Here's the DOM extracted from Firebug:

<a 
title="Flag this message" 
href="showFolder;_ylt=AokEn5N8GtV6E5E3hSQVG8bGAL4X?fid=Inbox&amp;sort=date&amp;order=down&amp;startMid=0&amp;.rand=1040505845&amp;da=0&amp;mid=1_1423_AEbPjkQAAN8wR5ZU1w8DpDKw%2Bsg&amp;mcrumb=zI1g7MGph9F&amp;flag=1"
class="greyed"> </a>

The reliance on background-image and the omission of link text are both authoring errors.

In terms of how to handle these errors, I'd suggest that as this A element has an HREF and is likely a control, either Gecko or NVDA should use the TITLE attribute to repair the A element's missing link text.

Compare:

http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10-TECHS/topics.html#link-techniques

[vtsaran]

Replying to benjaminhawkeslewis:

As far as I can tell this is not text positioned off-screen with CSS, but rather a TITLE attribute on an empty A element with HREF (the visible content being provided, to some users, with background-image). Here's the DOM extracted from Firebug:

Yes, this is correct. Confirmed.
In view of the circumstances, a work-around still needs to be found. A feature request, perhaps?

[jteh]

Does NVDA detect that there is a link present and just say "link"? If so, please try this with a Firefox 3.1 nightly if you haven't already. If I remember correctly, there was a fix included in Firefox 3.1 to use the title attribute for the link name when no content was provided.