Open Radar

 
Summary:
While interacting with HTML content using VoiceOver, line-by-line navigation fails; user cannot review plain text or long paragraphs line by line.

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Turn VoiceOver on in OS X.

2.  Navigate to any web page with any paragraph of text on it, or any plain text document.  Examples:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/26/microsoft_spartan_browser_rationale/
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5321.txt

3.  Interact with any paragraph of text, or with the entire document body in case it's plain.

4.  Try doing any review using just VO-Up and VO-Down.

Expected Results:
VoiceOver should just indicate where the lines break naturally or deliberately, just as they are displayed.

Actual Results:
Sometimes, you just hear the first line repeated for every attempted navigation; sometimes, especially for plain text, VoiceOver will read a completely unrelated part of the document, but still provide no useful navigation.

Notes:
This was not a problem in Mac OS X 10.6.8; it has been introduced since then.

About the only time I can reliably make the problem not occur is when reviewing preformatted text in pre HTML elements.  Weird, that.

Have I identified this problem before?  Somehow, I almost feel sure that I must have.  Regardless, it is a longstanding issue.

Yosemite provides some mitigation, in the form of arrow-key navigation without the VO keys, and where VoiceOver reading the text under the cursor.  But that has issues of its own.