Nope, screen readers (usually?) ignore elements with "display: none".

To be sure, you could add aria-hidden="true", which I'd guess most bots don't recognize.

http://alistapart.com/article/now-you-see-me/

Many don't just use display:none but position text off-screen or make it tiny or use sizing and overflow:hidden. I've seen a blind user be tripped up by these, so yes, it often also filters out disabled users.

Many people use tools incorrectly, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use those tools, you just have to be aware of the problem, which everyone in this (sub)thread now is.

A decent screen reader will look at the final rendered Dom and obviously cull items off-screen, the same colour as the background, or 1px high.

If it doesn't, its a bug in the screen reader.

There's quite clear standards on how screen readers are expected to interact with the DOM. What you claim is in none of them, and the techniques you mention are explicitly mentioned as something authors of webpages should avoid/mark up correctly for screenreaders.

No such screen reader exists, so you could claim it's a bug in all of them, but it's not a useful position to take. Screen readers are tricky enough to write without having to second-guess people who are trying to hide-but-not-hide text.

Unfortunately I've not given thought to people with disabilities in this case. It's an oversight and that's on me.

I wonder if bots are smart enough to figure out aria-hidden="true". Possibly empty it out using javascript on submit. I would guess a bot not using CSS would also not be using javascript? Unsure, would need testing.

Could we just tell the people with screen readers to ignore it?

As a fallback I imagine so yeah. I'm trying to think about what would be going on at the time, wondering if unexpected instructions inside a form would be confusing.

Disclaimer: I don't know how a screenreader would present this, example only

"Form entry. Input name. Input email. Ignore this field it's for spambots. Input url. Submit" -- In this case does the message more naturally apply to email or url? I'd imagine there'd be a pause after input email (to wait for the input)? I need to set up a screen reader :)

And then hide the warning using CSS too, so it gets picked up by screen readers just like the hidden input!

Should we put the onus on screen readers to not read elements that would not be displayed when the page is rendered in a browser??

Admittedly, I am not familiar with screen reader standards, but my gut feeling is that they are doing their users a disservice if they are not representing what browser users are seeing as similarly as possible.

You can set placeholder with something like "leave it empty".