Strange behavior with VO in safari when resetting zoom password?

Hello all
I was helping someone set up zoom recently and we had to reset her password. When the password page opened in safari, voice over started acting strangely when double tapping on the reset password text field. It responded very slowly, focus would only move to the status bar when I could move at all and eventually I could maybe get the page focused again or I had to hit the home button to return to the home screen. The phone is a brand new SE with all accessibility settings at defaults. I didn't think this would help but I did disable everything under accessibility/spoken content as well as auto correct and text prediction and same thing happened. I was able to use chrome instead but have never experienced such an issue in the 10 years I've been using voice over. All other text fields on the phone worked fine, mail, messages, searching in settings ETC.
I tried the same on 2 more phones, another SE and an 8 and everything worked fine with safari.
Anyone have any ideas what might be going on? Some kind of safari setting blocking voice over from entering the text field?
Thanks for any ideas or suggestions.