Almost as a note to myself and to justify the time I spent on analyzing aproblem, a quick note on what to watch out for when working trying to access read-only ADF Faces components from JavaScript. 

Those who tried JavaScript in ADF Faces probably know that you need to ensure the ADF Faces component  is represented by a JavaScript object on the client. You do this either implicitly by adding an af:clientListener component (in case you want to listen for a component event) or explicitly by setting the ADF Faces component clientComponent property to true.

For the use case I looked at in JDeveloper 11g R1 (11.1.1.7) I needed to make an output text component clickable to call a JavaScript function in response. Though I added the af:clientComponent tag to the component I recognized that it also needed the clientComponent property set to true.

Though I remember this as not being required in 11.1.1.6, I like the new behavior as it helps preventing read-only components from firing client side events unless you tell it to do so by setting the clientComponent property to true.

Note: As the time of writing, JDeveloper 11.1.1.7 is not publicly available and I put the note in this blog as a reminder in case you ever hit a similar challenge so you know what to do.