Things which are area-hidden don't get read by Select-to-Speak. This makes sense because the information is not in the accessibility tree. However, it's also a bit weird because aria-hidden things are still on the screen for the user.

For example, etsy.com has a big orange banner that starts, "Etsy keeps you safe", about halfway down the page. This banner is aria-hidden even though it's got a lot of text. Select-to-Speak users would find that STS doesn't speak anything here, yet they would be able to see the text on the screen.

This could be made possible as part of crbug.com/651614. Previously Blink removed aria-hidden nodes from the tree. With my change, they'd be included but skipped over downstream (like in the automation internal bindings).

It'd then be possible to maybe add a mode to automation where you could specify whether you want ignored nodes skipped over, or not. Select-to-speak probably wants to see the ignored nodes anyway, whereas ChromeVox usually doesn't.