NVDA isn't reading the content that is being given focus

Question

Been testing an accessibility modal window, it works as expected with JAWS 13 on IE8. However when I use NDVA and test on IE8 or Firefox, the focused content is not read.

When the modal is displayed it has aria-hidden="false" while the rest of the content on the page has aria-hidden="true".

This code works ("read at start" is read first on focus):

<div id="modalContent" aria-hidden="false">
  <h2>Some Text</h2>
  <div class="offScreen" id="first-focus">read at start</div>
  <p> asdf as df asdf asd fasdf</p>
</div>

But this code does not ("read at start" is not read when given focus):

<div id="modalContent" aria-hidden="false">
   <div class="offScreen" id="first-focus">read at start</div> 
   <h2>Some Text</h2>
   <p> asdf as df asdf asd fasdf</p>
</div>

Answer 1

Keeping the working code and putting something that isn't really read, like a "." and changing the h2 to a span provides a workable solution.