Beware Smushed Off-Screen Accessible Text

J. Renée Beach:

Over a few sessions, Matt mentioned that the string of text “Show more reactions” was being smushed together and read as “Showmorereactions”.

Turns out a popular technique for hiding content visually (but not hiding it for assistive technology) involved setting width: 1px; which was forcing words to wrap one-word-per-line with "line feed" breaks, which the AT didn't treat the same as spaces.

Facebook had to update their accessible hiding class to:

.accessible_elem { 
  clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); /* IE 6/7 */ 
  clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px); 
  height: 1px; 
  overflow: hidden; 
  position: absolute; 
  white-space: nowrap; /* added line */ 
  width: 1px; 
}

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