aria tabs - VO cursor does not follow programatic focus

I've been working on adding aria to an existing tab interface which uses url hashes (or fragments) to aid in sharing links to specific tabs. Ie, tabs.html#tab2 would show tab2 on page load.

I've been trying to follow best practices for tab accessibility as outlined by https://medium.com/@LeonieWatson/danger-testing-accessibility-with-real-people-4515f72db648

However, all of the examples that I have found for accessible tabs remove hash change functionality (the URL does not change when a tab is activated). When trying to implement it myself I ran into an odd issue. When VO is on and the VO cursor is on a tab, the VO cursor will not follow keyboard navigation to other tabs. Instead, focus will be directed immediately back to the tab with the VO cursor (preventing tabs from being read). This problem does not happen when VO is turned off (presumably because there is no VO cursor).

Notes

This only appears to happen in Safari
I haven't tried in other screen readers
All of my VO settings are in their default state

Examples:

Video demonstration of the issue: https://youtu.be/SkQ_vcJiIMI
Code example: https://gist.github.com/mfairchild365/9b2ba49ec87bd38bb34a433edd994a71 (note this code is not mine, I'm simply using it as an example with slight modifications)
Live example: https://mfairchild365.com/temp/aira-tabs/tabs.html#home

What I have tried:

sending focus to the currently selected tab before and after the hash change
an ugly hack where I remove the hash ID from the body before the hash change and add it back after
preventDefault() in both the click and hashchange event handlers

None of which worked. No matter what I do, I can not get the VO cursor to follow keyboard navigation for tabs.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

Solution

It appears that I jumped the gun and assumed that the issue was due to VO not following programmatic focus. The REAL issue appears to be either a VO or browser bug and is actually CSS related. See my example page here: http://mfairchild365.github.io/aria-tabs-vo-bug/

I'd like to understand why a single CSS rule is having such an impact. If you can answer this, please open an issue in my example repo.