Selenium determines an element is visible or not by the following criteria (use a DOM inspector to determine what css applies to your element, make sure you look at computed style):
- visibility != hidden
- display != none (is also checked against every parent element)
- opacity != 0 (this is not checked for clicking an element)
- height and width are both > 0
- for an input, the attribute type != hidden
Your element is matching one of those criteria. If you do not have the ability to change the styling of the element, here is how you can forcefully do it with javascript (going to assume WebDriver since you said Selenium2 API):
((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("arguments[0].checked = true;", inputElement);
But that won’t fire a javascript event, if you depend on the change event for that input you’ll have to fire it too (many ways to do that, easiest to use whatever javascript library is loaded on that page).
The source for the visibility check –
https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/blob/master/javascript/atoms/dom.js#L577
The WebDriver spec that defines this –
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webdriver/raw-file/tip/webdriver-spec.html#widl-WebElement-isDisplayed-boolean