Unable to reproduce the issue on the reported chrome version stable 62.0.3202.75 and on the latest canary 64.0.3254.0 using windows10, Ububtu 14.04 and Mac 10.12.6 with the below mentioned steps.
1.Opened chrome
2. Navigated to the URL provided
3. Started NVDA
4. Moved throught the list items in the progress bar
We observed the third item is not clickable. Attaching the screen cast of the same.

@dmazzoni: Could you please have a look at the screen cast and help us in further triaging.

Thanks!

Deleted: 779869.mp4 1.3 MB

	779869.mp4 1.3 MB View Download

In the video it looks like you're not using NVDA's i key to move through the list items. This is where the issue lies. The element isn't clickable because there's no href attribute, but if you listen to NVDA's (or JAWS') speech output when it moves to the element, you'll hear it say "clickable".

Using NVDA's Focus Highlight plugin (https://addons.nvda-project.org/addons/focusHighlight.en.html) will help identify if you are using NVDA to move through the list items.

This is a great example of where the spec diverges from the real world.

I've seen way too many real sites that use the <a> element with no href for actual links - often using CSS for styling, and a click handler somewhere. And no, we can't just try to detect the click handler because it's often a click handler on the body or some ancestor.

There's a tradeoff between trying to follow the spec to make the web platform predictable for developers, and deviating from the spec on occasion to enable users to still use poorly authored sites.

I'm leaving this open as Pri-3 for now in case anyone has any other thoughts, but I'd be unlikely to support changing this without some evidence (maybe some stats over millions of real world sites)

What's interesting is that if you bring up NVDA's or JAWS' links panel (NVDA Key + F7 or Insert + F7 respectively), you won't see the <a> element listed. So, in one respect the correct information is being sent to the screen reader, but for some reason it's still announced as "clickable" when moved to with "i" key. And, as mentioned above, this behavior isn't present on macOS with VoiceOver.

This issue has been Available for over a year. If it's no longer important or seems unlikely to be fixed, please consider closing it out. If it is important, please re-triage the issue.

Sorry for the inconvenience if the bug really should have been left as Available.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

It's only announced as clickable if there is a click handler.
Try data:text/html,<style>a {text-decoration:underline;}</style><a>hello</a> <a>bye</a>
The href-less links aren't announced as clickable.