@hhanke a few notes:

• this looks awesome
• have you tried using ARIA and setting (and removing) role=presentation on the <a> elements? If it worked, then that would not require appending a span with the text. It might also help with the noticeable lag experienced when invoking the switching - adding and removing an attribute (role) should be hopefully roughly twice as fast than adding an attribute (style) and appending element to DOM with already present textual content, effectively roughly doubling the size of the HTML (and DOM); not to speak that just adding role would not require complete visual re-layout of the whole web content by WebKit.
• the bug you are referring to that I discovered and reported in the mailing list (and rdar) was fixed in iOS 9b2. So if it is present again, it is a regression. I just tried with the sample code attached to the rdar and while the magic tap gets reported to accessibiltiyPerformMagicTap on the view controller, it still starts/stops playing my music nevertheless (i.e. magic tap gets propagated to 2 places, does 2 things), as if I were returning false from the method (which I am not). So it would be worthwile to open a new rdar (or reopen the current one at rdar://problem/20940938 ). If you are however seeing the behavior that the magic tap is indeed not reported to the view controller at all in your code, then ... well let's say WebKit really has a spirit (not only) accessibility-wise :-) (My sample code does not load content from the web but from a static HTML string, maybe that is the reason for the difference...)
• I guess a general solution directly in VoiceOver could be to allow to play an indicator in the form of a supershort sound when a link is encountered, and not say the usual "link" or pause the speech anyhow. VoiceOver already allows that on OS X (and some screen readers on other platforms allow for such possibility too), though perhaps the user experience could still be improved a little more (no/smaller delay due to the sound, no splitting of text on link/non-link boundaries, more "fluent" feeling to the reading). And the sound could be also turned off completely by the user (to approach the uncompromising efficiency of UX you have in the demo).

I am reopening, as neither of the two mentioned instances are fixed: share sheet did get "Cancel" button, but this is not invokable through accessibility escape gesture. ReferencesVC still does not have accessibilityEscape implemented.

@BGerstle-WMF this can be closed, the PR was indeed merged.

@TheDJ I think @hhanke opened a rdar for this too; since OS X Lion, voices for dozen of languages are preinstalled on OS X (just like on iOS), so there is nothing in the way apart from making a decision to implement it; would love to see this feature on OS X too!

For those interested, here is a short video demonstrating VoiceOver switching languages in the language list for languages it has voices for (to this day, I still find it cool that VoiceOver for iOS can do this :-)

Just realized this does not work as I imagined. E.g. on Czech wikipedia London Underground redirects to Metro v Londýně. The London Underground page on Czech Wikipedia is not in any way connected with the London Underground article on English Wikipedia.

I think I better handle the ShareOptions and References in a new bug (T124712), because I might not get to it soon, especially given that both these situations seem harder code-wise than the above ones (I tried yesterday).

PR #411

PR #410

Closing in favor of: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124593?workflow=71120 (because that one is a proper subtask of accessibility meta bug).