No, at least not in VoiceOver, which I use. In my experience, screen readers/assistants don't mimic the left/middle/right click of the mouse [0]. You often get two options: left click and double click [1]. There is also a right-click menu (control space), but unless it is based on a system-native UI, it is likely to be unusable for SR.
[0]: It is even easier to not use a mouse, when you are using an assistant. With a keyboard and VO you can resize, drag and drop and do many more activities.
Uh, that's interesting, but it does not work for me :(
AFAIK, VO+Command+Return can be used to select multiple things, not to click. For example, in the file viewer (Finder.app, similar to Nautilus/explorer.exe), it is similar to pressing Control (win/linux) and the left mouse button when the cursor is over a file to add it to the selection.
Edit: To open a page in a new tab in a Firefox with stock VoiceOver, I need to press VO+Shift+M to open context menu (aka right-click menu), and then select an option from the list (by greping, using arrows etc.).
VoiceOver is most often, and best, paired with Safari.
By default, Command-Return, no VO key, opens a focused link in a new tab behind the current tab. It's not a VoiceOver-specific keyboard command. It also works in Firefox and Chrome.
However, by default, Safari does not focus links when pressing the Tab key, you need to go to Settings > Advanced and check "Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage" first.
Even if a screen reader does, someone using a touch screen usually doesn't. If you step out of your bubble for a moment you'll notice that quite a lot of non-technical people no longer have computers, they do everything on a mobile device of some sort which typically does not have a mouse or keyboard.
I'm quite confident that you wouldn't have to interview many people to discover that even though it is not beyond people that it is unknown to many.
I know several non-technical people who find the distinction between window and tab difficult to manage for instance. As well as people who have had Android mobiles for years and still don't understand those three little buttons at the bottom of the screen: back, home, 'task' list.
d: Represent resources only as standard hypertext documents.
h: Progressively enhance with nonstandard features. The traditional
affordances of hypertext will remain available—for example,
middle clicking to branch browser history.
k: But screen readers can’t middle click.
a: Branching is afforded by *some* interface though, right?
w: Not on touch screens.
a: Not even by using the touch interface?
w: Nope. You can’t expect everyone to know how to use it.
So we’ve established that many people are unable to effectively navigate the web using the native features of their web browser. It’s not clear to me how that informs the surrounding debate. Are browsers’ navigation features inadequate? In context that sounds like an argument in favor of websites implementing their own navigation.
Personally I’d prefer us to prioritize building a web of addressable resources rather than applications, and to the extent that our user agents aren’t meeting our needs, improve them rather than work around them.
> to the extent that our user agents aren’t meeting our needs, improve them rather than work around them.
Most of us are in no position to improve our user agents only large organizations like Google or Mozilla can do that. In fact calling them user agents is extremely misleading in most cases.
If they were genuinely user agents they would obey the user not the server. They would assist the user to a much greater degree than they do now; for instance there is no native way of saving the rendered page in either Firefox or Chrome so sharing a page is exceptionally difficult if the URL points at a resource that require logging in and also risks that the resource changes before the recipient can read it. One has to install an add on to do that and hope that the author doesn't get bored of maintaining it or piss off the Chrome Store or whatever it is called.
