VoiceOver on macOS Safari only reading words, not characters

[gtritchie]

Repro Steps

Load Kitchen Sink into Safari (macOS 10.15.2, Safari 13.0.4).

Turn on VoiceOver (Cmd+F5 with regular keyboard, Cmd+triple-press TouchId button on touchbar keyboard).

Put focus in the editor, and use right/left arrow keys to move through the text.

Problem

Reads the entire "word" that the cursor is in each time you press arrow, never reads the individual characters.

Expected

Should hear each character as you move past it (default VoiceOver setting). Editing a source file "word by word" is rather... unpleasant.

Other Notes

If you create a simple web page with a textarea, it behaves correctly (reads each character).

This behaves correctly on Chrome, but Chrome on macOS has many other unpleasant behaviors with VoiceOver (including reading the wrong line of text due to https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=912689) , and generally it is recommended to use VoiceOver with Safari.

I also see variations of this problem on Windows with NVDA / FireFox (the thing being read is often a single character, repeated over and over, while you navigate a line of text). Chrome with NVDA on Windows works fine in this situation.

[gtritchie]

Note there is a more general issue on screen-reader support: #2164

Mentioning to establish a link.

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