Reported by jteh on 2008-03-18 22:39
In HTML, there are two uses for the tag:

1. The HREF attribute refers to a destination so that when the link is activated, the browser will jump to that destination.
2. The NAME attribute creates a link destination which can be referenced elsewhere.
   When there is no HREF attribute, the element is not a link (i.e. it does not jump to another destination).

Unfortunately, Firefox exposes A elements without an HREF attribute as links to accessibility APIs. Imho, this is a bug in Firefox; see MozillaBug:423603. However, this has been done for a long time and IE apparently does it as well, so fixing the issue in Firefox may cause breakage. Thus, the change needs to be made in the NVDA gecko_ia2 backend.

Two methods can be used to determine whether there is no HREF attribute:

• The link object will not have the linked state set.
• The accessible value will be empty.
  Either of these methods can be used. If no HREF is detected, the backend should ignore the link object (but still render everything below).