While browsing the web, I often hear VoiceOver read an HTML element, then say the word "clickable". It's usually not on a button or link. More often, it's on static text. I've tried the various VoiceOver click equivalents, including VO+Space, VO+Shift+Space, and bringing the mouse pointer to the control and physically clicking the mouse. Most of the time, nothing happens.
Sometimes I'm surprised, though. When creating an AppleVis post, for example, there is a static text label just before the forum pulldown menu. VoiceOver reads the static text as, "forum, clickable". And if I press VO+Space on that text, it activates the adjacent pulldown menu. But even this behavior isn't consistent. Again using AppleVis posts as an example, I can navigate to the subscribe checkbox, interact, and navigate to the static text label. VoiceOver does not read this as clickable, but nonetheless, clicking it checks the checkbox. So it's confusing, to say the least.
I'd love to turn it off, but, much like WTA, the clickable announcement does not obey the general verbosity setting, and there are no speech hints to control it.
Any insights into why this announcement exists, ideas for turning it off, or even a pointer to where it might be mentioned in Apple's documentation would be appreciated.
Comments
Addendum
As I navigate through the text of my post above using VO+right arrow, the word "clickable" is announced at the end of each paragraph. Interestingly, if I use VO+A to read the article, VoiceOver does not announce clickable after every paragraph.
Not in Safari
Happens in Google Chrome but not in Safari. Huh.
Clickable origins
Way back when computers used floppy disks, the sighted people used a mouse to navigate their operating systems, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth ...
someone decided that the "clickable" element would be an amazing idea. I want to say it was back in the days of.dhtml (dynamic HTML) content. You could add elements to a webpage where, upon a mouse click, the content would change/expand.
Let's take a look at the AppleVis mobile website, for example. About three swipes from the top left corner, we get a, "Main Menu, button, collapsed", element. This kind of control is what the clickable element used to be used for.
As far as I can tell, people still utilize the clickable element primarily for aesthetic purposes. Since visually speaking, it's not really something you would necessarily know you click on it, with the exception that your mouse pointer would likely change when you mouse over that particular element.
Does this make sense?
Before I forget
Before you ask why you're getting the clickable feedback on just about everything, my best, most educated and experience answer for you would be simply, because macOS VoiceOver is all kinds of broken.
Seriously? I thought we'd…
Seriously? I thought we'd need a 100 page academic paper for that :)
I'm getting this clickable thing in chrome as well but I only use chrome for web apps like teams where this doesn't seem to happen, only regular text like on applevis for example.
Windows too
It’s weird and annoying alright.
The thing is that this is one thing I’m not sure we can blame Apple for, as I’m sure I’ve encountered it on Windows too. I think more with NVDA than Jaws though. Plus as mentioned, on Mac, it seems to be on Chrome but not Safari.
I stand to be corrected though 🤷♂️
Dave
With NVDA you have a toggle…
With NVDA you have a toggle since a while to disable clickable announcement. I doesn't happen everywhere only on elements that are actually clickable and I leave it off for personal preference but it's a very useful attribute to know sometimes. The thing is that it seems to be new on mac either due to a chrome update or a macos one.
Brave has this too
I am having the same issue with Brave browser. It is annoying but I can do with it.
Pretty normal. All chromium…
Pretty normal. All chromium browsers probably do.
Agree with TheBlindGuy07…
Agree with TheBlindGuy07. NVDA has an element toggle that is simply glorious. I too have clickable disabled. Along with Article, and a few choice others. 😉
I'd love a toggle
If NVDA can provide a toggle for this on Windows, then it seems like VoiceOver could do the same on MacOS.
The similarities with the Writing Tools announcement are uncanny. Both clickable and WTA are announced via VoiceOver with no visual equivalent that would distract sighted users. Both are incapable of being toggled off. And both are pointless and provide no tangible information.
I'd lobby Apple to put clickable under control of general verbosity, but I've gotten nowhere with my attempts to similarly control WTA, and I'm out of energy.
Incredibly annoying
It just started happening in Chromium browsers (Ege, Chrome and Brave) recently and it drives me mad. It seems to happen on every single bit of plain text that isn't marked up with anything special. It drives me mad.
I wonder if there is some new Chrome feature that lets you interact with text somehow. Didn't they add something wher eyou could circle text and ask questions or something like that? I wonder if there is some weird feature that means you can do stuff with this if you have a mouse. But for us it seems to just be irritating. If you read a long article it says clickable after pretty much everything. And not to mention the times when it reads the same line twice. I'm really upset how bad Chrome has become recently.
Looking for alternatives
Agreed. After about a year of more or less problem-free Chrome usage, I'd like to find an alternative. As usual, I'm busy with other projects, and I'll have to make do with Safari and Chrome, whatever is least painful.
Yes in windows
Definitely see it regularly with NVDA. It's usually where someone used something like a javascript event to trigger code on a click instead of using a link or a button. I find it often does something but it isn't uncommon for it to not register no matter what I do, particularly annoying when the occasional site requires the clickable element to be used.
How do Firefox or Opera fare…
How do Firefox or Opera fare these days?
Firefox and Opera
Firefox is also suffering from the clickables at the moment. On the whole I find it is in third place - it works and there are some on here using it with VoiceOver. But I'm not sure it does much better than the others.
As for Opera, I used to love it back in the day - only browser I ever paid for. No idea about accessibility back then. But once it hit version 10, I think, it became just another Chromium browser. I switched to Vivaldi at that point, but moved away from that when I started using VoiceOver as it had a few issues. Not been back to either since so don't know if they are any better. But I don't think they are going to be much different to Chrome in terms of rendering.
Resolved in current Chrome
And there was great rejoicing.
Brave and Firefox
I updated Brave and it has also been cured.
Firefox, however, is still telling me clickable at every opportunity.
Probably
Probably a chromium thing, with firefox having its own rendering engine.
Clickable is back
Some time after I posted this, a release of Google Chrome addressed the issue, and reading websites was pleasantly "clickable"-free.
A recent update to Google Chrome has brought clickable back. Because, apparently, even a $400 billion company can't be bothered to implement regression testing.
Oh no
I was noticing this earlier in the ChatGPT app, and now I've checked Chrome and you are right, it is back. I can't put into words how much I hate this.
Clickable--there's a speech dictionary for that!
Subject says it all, I guess. You can't control what these companies do, but the speech dictionary can be used to make the experience better. Sometimes it's all we've got lol.
Loving greetings to my spiritual brother-from-another-mother Paul. Pray you're doing amazing!
Thanks AbleTech
I used the VO Utility pronunciation table. For the pronunciation of clickable, I used a period. Space didn't work.
I'm back to being clickable-free, even in the heading for this forum topic. Good enough for now.
Re: Clickable--there's a speech dictionary for that!
You mean add a pronunciation rule for clickable to make it disappear? The thought had occurred to me, but switching to Safari except in emergency seemed like the better option. I hate things like that - maybe that shows a lack of blind person credentials on my part. Just imagine reading this topic if clickable was blanked out. We'd think Paul had gone nuts.
Re: Clickable--there's a speech dictionary for that!
Chrome's click-able is lowercase, so I made the pronunciation case-sensitive. I still hear the word when an initial capital C is used.
A question
It used to be, that you could enable/disable certain elements from being read aloud by voiceover. You could also choose the order in which things were addressed. For example, you could have a link spoken aloud as the link name, followed by it status, etc. Or buy it status first, followed by the name, etc.
Is this still the case? And if so, is clickable items not within this list?
Disclaimer, genuinely asking here. Not trying to speak negatively on VoiceOver.
Thanks Brian
I also can confirm the bug. Yes, that's true. If you go to the "Verbosity" > "Speech", and change the verbosity of the "Text" control to low, the clickable will go away. It's the status in VO's terms for text. Not sure if this will make other places more confusing, I was curious so have only tested that.
Thank you again, Brian.
Huh. Yeah, that works
I have default verbosity set to low all the time, so I didn't think there would be a way to make it any lower. It turned out I had set custom verbosity to Medium for text elements, for some unknown reason. Changing it to Default made clickable go away.
Good tip, thanks.
Happy to help
Glad my outdated knowledge could still be useful. 😊