So, there's an html page with an image map (img tag with usemap attribute) and clickable areas. Lately, I think after iOS 15 upgrade on iphone (XR, XS, 13), Safari stops firing onclick event on areas. Initially onclick works if you tap lightly, with quick finger presses, but as soon as you tap a little longer (just a bit stronger tap, or a long press) it starts behaving as if there's no map and areas associated with the image.
You can test here https://demo.rezmagic.com/maptest.html
If you see "area click" messages, it works correctly. When you start seeing "image click" messages, it means it's broken - it does not detect areas anymore. If you reload page, it starts to work correctly again.
Any ideas on what's going on here? Possible workaround? I submitted a Safari bug on Apple feedback but I am not sure it was the right place.
This is absolutely a Safari bug on mobile and desktop and it's been driving me nuts. Your image doesn't replicate the issue on desktop safari, but those with higher resolution and more obvious text do.
What's happening is that Safari now OCRs images to allow users to select and copy text from them. It does this by adding shadow DOM elements containing the text that float above the image, all contained within one DIV that entirely covers the image. This doesn't happen instantly, but seems to take a little time and perhaps depend on user interaction with the image.
You can watch this happen by opening the MDN web docs page for the map element here and looking at the Example (not the demo) with Inspect Element. The img tag with the map starts out simple, but once it shows that it has children you can expand it and see the shadow DOM elements. Once those are added the map no longer functions, presumably because the overlay elements pass through clicks to the image but not the map.