For anyone interested, I solved this in the following ways:
1) I was originally testing this on OSX with Firefox 17 and Selenium 2.28/29, but figured out it only works (at least for me) on Windows with Firefox 18 and Selenium 2.29
2) interacting with SVGs with the standard:
driver.findElement(By.xpath(YOUR XPATH)).click();
doesn’t work. You need to use Actions.
3) to interact with SVG objects, the following XPath works:
"/*[name()='svg']/*[name()='SVG OBJECT']";
The SVG object being anything under the SVG element (e.g. circle, rect, text, etc).
An example of clicking an SVG object:
WebElement svgObject = driver.findElement(By.xpath(YOUR XPATH));
Actions builder = new Actions(driver);
builder.click(svgObject).build().perform();
Note: you need to call the path inside the click() function; using:
moveToElement(YOUR XPATH).click().build().perform();
doesn’t work.