Apple has today released macOS 15 Sequoia to the public. As usual, we won’t cover the mainstream features here, concentrating instead on what's new and changed for blind and low vision users. For an overview of the mainstream changes, we recommend this in-depth review by MacStories.
Please remember to check the section about bugs to see if now is the right time to upgrade. There’s no harm in holding off a few weeks or months to let Apple address a problem you may find too disruptive to deal with.
A note to braille users: the AppleVis team members doing testing with macOS Sequoia are not heavy braille users. We have no information as to how well braille works in this release, so please keep this in mind when upgrading. If you are a braille user who has experience with Sequoia, please share your findings in the comments to help the community.
Changes for Blind and Low Vision Users
Last year Apple brought Quick Nav changes, per voice settings, and Siri voice improvements to macOS Sonoma. This year, macOS Sequoia brings some more changes and a handful of bug fixes.
Command customization
With macOS Sequoia, VoiceOver commands have become vastly more customizable, with the ability to change the assignments of many commands, and create your own assignments using the VoiceOver modifier in addition to the numpad, trackpad, left or right Option key, and single keys. An extensive list of commands can be viewed and changed in VoiceOver Utility > Commands. This new command customization facility replaces the distinct "Commanders" found in prior versions of macOS.
For an audio demonstration of this feature, check out the AppleVis Podcast episode "A Demonstration and Walkthrough of VoiceOver Command Customization on macOS."
Customizable voice rotor
As on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia allows you to change the voices that appear in the voice rotor, one of the speech rotors accessed by pressing VO-Command-Shift-left or right arrow. You can add or remove voices in any language in VoiceOver Utility > Speech > Voices.
Personal voice for VoiceOver and Spoken Content
As on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, you can now use your personal voice as the voice for VoiceOver and Spoken Content in macOS Sequoia. Your personal voice can be set up by going to System Settings > Accessibility > Personal Voice.
New language support
As on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia adds new Kazakh and Lithuanian voices that can be used with VoiceOver and Spoken Content.
New VoiceOver tutorial
In macOS Sequoia, the longstanding VoiceOver Quick Start has been replaced by a new VoiceOver tutorial, similar to that found on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. Like the VoiceOver Quick Start in prior versions of macOS, the new VoiceOver tutorial can be accessed by going to System Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver, or by pressing VO-Command-F8 from anywhere in the operating system.
Braille Improvements
While it is not something we have been able to test, we are aware of the following improvement for braille users in macOS Sequoia:
- As on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, you can now specify different braille tables for input and output in macOS Sequoia. This can be configured by going to VoiceOver Utility > Braille > Translation, deselecting the "Match input and output tables" checkbox, and choosing your desired tables from the respective "input" and "output" popup menus. Note that you may need to first add the tables to the braille table rotor by clicking the Add button in voiceOver Utility > Braille > Translation before they will appear in the popup menus.
Improvements for Low Vision Users
While it is not something we have been able to test, we are aware of the following improvements for low vision users:
- As on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, you can now turn off the blinking cursor in macOS Sequoia. Just go to System Settings > Accessibility > Display, and toggle the "Prefer non-blinking cursor" switch on.
- The number of apps supporting custom text sizes has expanded to include Books, News, Stocks, and Weather. These settings can be found in System Settings > Accessibility > Display.
If you are a low vision Mac user, we would love to hear in the comments your experience and thoughts on these and any additional enhancements you encounter in macOS Sequoia.
Other Changes
- The speech rates for many voices have been altered slightly in macOS Sequoia, meaning you may need to readjust the rate for your preferred voice after installing the upgrade to make it comfortable for you. In addition, it is no longer possible to adjust the speech rate by any interval other than five. It is not currently known whether this change is intensional or not.
- As on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, new "Night" and "fire" background sounds have been introduced in macOS Sequoia. These, and other background sounds, can be found in System Settings > Accessibility > Audio.
- As on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, custom phrases or utterances, known as Vocal Shortcuts, can be configured in macOS Sequoia to perform a variety of tasks on your Mac. Apple touts this feature as being useful for those with atypical speech.
Change List
In its support documentation, Apple lists the following changes for VoiceOver users in macOS Sequoia:
- The Languages rotor is now called the Voice rotor. Use the Voice rotor to switch between voices, regardless of language. VoiceOver also offers new voices for Arabic, Chinese, English, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean.
- The Commanders category in VoiceOver Utility is now called the Commands category. You can use it to customize the commands you use to control VoiceOver. You can customize the commands you use with the VoiceOver modifier, as well as the commands you use with NumPad keys, Option keys, Quick Nav, or trackpad gestures.
- When you interact with nested content, you sometimes need to press VO-Shift-Down Arrow multiple times to drill down into, for example, a group contained inside another group. When you’re done exploring nested content in an app, you can now press VO-Shift-Escape to jump to the app’s top level, instead of needing to press VO-Shift-Up Arrow multiple times.
- You can now start VoiceOver in Recovery Mode so you can temporarily use VoiceOver with the default settings. This can be useful if you change a setting by mistake and VoiceOver no longer works as you expect. In Recovery Mode, you can use VoiceOver Utility to change settings as needed or restore VoiceOver settings to their defaults.
- If your Mac has a built-in trackpad, you can now set an option to disable it when VoiceOver is on. This may be useful if you want to avoid accidentally performing gestures on the trackpad.
- VoiceOver offers a redesigned interactive tutorial.
- VoiceOver offers support for two additional languages—Kazakh and Lithuanian.
Bug Fixes and New Bugs for VoiceOver Users
Below are lists of the bugs we believe to have been resolved in macOS Sequoia, as well as new bugs introduced in this release. We strongly recommend that you read through the list of new bugs and any replies before updating; as this will allow you to make an informed decision on whether to install macOS Sequoia or wait for a future release.
With our small team, it's impossible to test every Mac model, configuration, application, and use case. We can't claim our bug list is comprehensive or that our assessments are infallible. Some issues may manifest only under specific conditions - you likely won't experience every bug. Also, expect to encounter problems not listed that we missed in our testing.
To ensure the information here is as complete and accurate as possible, we welcome feedback below from those who have installed macOS Sequoia. Please confirm if you're encountering the same problems listed or if you've found workarounds. Also let us know about any additional issues not mentioned here. Of course, it's even more important that you report any new bugs directly to Apple - they're already aware of the ones listed here. For an explanation of why and how to report bugs to Apple, see this post.
Accessibility Bugs Resolved in macOS Sequoia
Our testing indicates that Apple has resolved the following bugs in macOS Sequoia:
- The process for generating a strong password in Safari has changed, with VoiceOver no longer losing focus after clicking the "Use strong password" button in password fields. Now, to generate a strong password in Safari, focus on a password field, press the Down-Arrow key to focus on the "Use strong password" option, and press Return.
- When focusing on a message in the Messages app and pressing VO-Shift-M, the "Tapback" submenu is now accessible with VoiceOver.
- Widget suggestions in the "Edit widgets" interface are now clearly labeled.
New Bugs for VoiceOver Users in macOS Sequoia
Our testing suggests that the following bugs have been introduced in macOS Sequoia:
- During regular use such as email or web browsing, VoiceOver will frequently crash and restart itself. This appears to be limited to Intel based Macs.
- iPhone Mirroring is completely inaccessible with VoiceOver. Even when turning VoiceOver off in order to pass keyboard commands to the iPhone, only the iOS VoiceOver navigation sounds are played through the Mac, not speech as would be expected. As audio from the iPhone can be played to the Mac, and the Mac’s keyboard can be used to control the iPhone, it is our position that the user should be able to hear iOS VoiceOver audio through their Mac, and use their Mac’s keyboard to navigate the iOS user interface.
- Nothing happens when pressing VO-Space on the “Page menu” and “show Reader appearance customization options” buttons in Safari's toolbar. To click this button, Focus on it, route the mouse pointer to it by pressing VO-Command-F5, and press VO-Shift-Space to click the mouse.
- When focusing on a shared group in the Passwords sidebar table, the number of items in the group are spoken, but not the group’s name. Pressing VO-F2 will cause VoiceOver to speak the window title, which is named after the currently selected group.
- When focusing on an account in the table in Passwords and pressing VO-J, VoiceOver focus sometimes moves to the search field in the toolbar, rather than the scroll area displaying information for that account. When this occurs, pressing VO-J a second time will move VoiceOver focus from the search field to the scroll area.
- When performing VoiceOver’s “Speak Wi-Fi status” command, (VO-F7 three times by default) the signal strength is spoken, but not the name of the connected network.
macOS Sequoia release notes
macOS Sequoia introduces new features to help you be more productive and creative on Mac. With the latest Continuity feature, iPhone Mirroring, you can access your entire iPhone on Mac. It’s easy to tile windows to quickly create your ideal workspace, and you can even see what you’re about to share while presenting with Presenter Overlay. A big update to Safari features Distraction Control, Highlights, and a redesigned Reader, making it easy to get things done while you browse the web. macOS Sequoia also brings text effects and emoji Tapbacks to Messages, Math Notes to Calculator, the ability to plan a hike in Maps, and so much more.
iPhone Mirroring
- iPhone Mirroring lets you access and control your iPhone on Mac, giving you a convenient way to browse your Home Screen, launch iPhone apps, and interact with them on Mac
- Keyboard and trackpad support enables you to type and use Multi-Touch gestures to swipe through apps on your Home Screen, pinch to zoom, and scroll in apps
- iPhone Notifications on Mac allow you to view and take action on notifications from iPhone right on your Mac
Easier window tiling
- Tiled window enhancements make it easier to arrange windows by dragging them to the screen’s edge to place them side-by-side or in corners on your desktop
- Keyboard and menu shortcuts can be used to arrange windows into tiled positions even faster
Safari
- Distraction Control helps you hide items on a webpage that you find disruptive to your browsing
- Highlights surface key information from the webpage you’re visiting with summaries, locations, and more
- Redesigned Reader offers even more ways to enjoy articles with a streamlined view of the article you’re reading, a summary, and a table of contents for longer articles
- Viewer lets you watch videos without distractions, and automatically moves videos into Picture-in-Picture when you click away from the page
Passwords
- Passwords app lets you see all your credentials for websites and apps in one place, making it even easier to access your passwords, passkeys, Wi-Fi passwords, and verification codes
- Verification codes can be set up right in Passwords so you can easily copy them or autofill them into Safari without even having to open the app
- Secure syncing ensures your accounts saved in Passwords sync seamlessly with iCloud with end-to-end encryption so you can access them on your other devices
- Windows support through the iCloud Passwords app so you can access your passwords on Windows devices
Video Conferencing
- Presenter Overlay lets you preview your screen before sharing it in video calls
- Play preview gives you a preview of where your content and presenter notes will be when you click Play in Keynote
- Background replacement allows you to upload your own photo or choose from several built-in options to use as your video call background
Messages
- Text effects bring your conversations to life by visually amplifying any letter, word, phrase, or emoji in iMessage with dynamic, animated effects like explode, ripple, and nod
- Text formatting lets you add bold, underline, italics, and strikethrough to any letter, word, or phrase in iMessage
- Emoji and sticker Tapbacks let you react to a message using any emoji or sticker, giving you access to the Tapbacks you and your friends send the most with just a swipe
- Send Later lets you compose a message now and schedule it to send later
Maps
- Topographic maps display features like trails, contour lines, elevation, and points of interest
- Hikes are available across all U.S. national parks and can be saved to your device to access while offline
- Custom walking and hiking routes can be created for hikes in the park, regular exercise routines in your neighborhood, walking tours while on vacation, and more
- Places Library combines all your saved places, guides, and hiking routes into one location for easy access
Notes
- Audio recordings can be started right from inside a note, and kept with related comments, checklists, and documents
- Live transcriptions show as you record audio, and transcripts are fully searchable so you can always find what you need
- Math in Notes let you enter expressions in your note to have them solve instantly
- Collapsible sections help you simplify and hide text in long notes; just click next to a section header to lighten up your most text-heavy notes
- Highlight text in your note with a choice of five colors allows you to make your text standout
Photos
- Collections automatically organize your library by helpful topics in the sidebar, like Days, Trips, People & Pets, and Featured Photos
- Groups in People & Pets include photos of your favorite people or pets who frequently appear together
- Video speed control lets you slow down high frame rate video content with in and out points
- Utilities includes additional helpful collections like Documents, Receipts, and more, and items you’ve recently edited, viewed, and shared
- Recovered album in Utilities surfaces images that are on your device but were not previously visible due to database corruption in a locked album
Apple TV app
- Subtitles automatically appear at just the right times, like when the content language doesn’t match your device language, when you mute the audio, or when you skip back while watching a program
AirPods
- Hands-free Siri Interactions let you respond to Siri announcements with AirPods by simply nodding your head ‘yes’ or shaking your head ‘no’
- Voice Isolation on AirPods Pro provides clearer call quality for those you are speaking with, even in windy conditions or places with loud background noise
- Personalized Spatial Audio for gaming with AirPods puts you in the middle of the action with sound that surrounds you combined with a new API for developers that makes it easier than ever to enable
This release also includes other features and improvements:
- Updated basic and scientific calculators in Calculator app can now solve expressions, convert units, and access a history of past calculations
- Reminders in Calendar lets you create, view, edit and complete reminders alongside your meetings and appointments
- Recently Deleted list in Reminders lets you view and retrieve deleted reminders
- Scenes in Freeform allow you to organize your content into sections, then save, label and order them as you like
- Feels Like temperature in Weather app is displayed prominently near the actual temperature when they differ significantly
- Guest access in Home app lets you provide visitors with date and time- based access to locks, garage doors, and alarm systems
- Electricity usage and rate plan information in Home app are displayed for eligible customers when connecting their utility account, starting with Pacific Gas and Electric Company in California
- Accessibility Vocal Shortcuts help people with severe atypical speech record custom utterances that trigger specific actions on Mac
Some features may not be available for all regions or on all Apple devices.
For more information, please visit this website: https://www.apple.com/macos/macos-sequoia
For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please visit this website: https://support.apple.com/100100
In Closing
macOS Sequoia is a solid upgrade that adds a few new features and enhancements for blind and low vision users. We encountered no show-stopping bugs in this version of macOS. Our recommendation is to update when you're ready. You may want to give developers time to update their apps and others opportunity to find the bugs or other problems we missed, but we believe most users should be okay to update now.
We'd love to hear your thoughts after you've had a chance to install the upgrade. What new features do you find most useful? Are there any changes you don't like? Please share your feedback in the comments below. Let us know what Apple got right with this release and where you think there's still room for improvement.
In closing, we thank Apple's Accessibility team for their prompt response in fixing many of the bugs reported during the macOS Sequoia beta cycle. However, some problems remain unresolved, and we find the fact that a headlining feature of this release, iPhone Mirroring, is completely inaccessible with VoiceOver incredibly disappointing. We encourage Apple to promptly address this and other outstanding accessibility issues discussed in this post and the comments below so that macOS can be as accessible, usable, and enjoyable as possible for all users.
To install macOS Sequoia, choose System Settings from the Apple menu, select General in the table, click Software Update in the scroll area, and click the Upgrade Now button to begin the upgrade process. If other updates are available, you can click "More info" to see details about them and select specific updates to install.
More information on how to update the software on your Mac is available on this Apple Support page.
Comments
Re Problems With Quick Nav
In response to Nicole, yes, I have been getting exactly this issue and also think that the issue was introduced some time during the Ventura Lifecycle, certainly don't remember it in Sonoma.
I've already used feedback assistant to alert Apple of this but no response as yet.
Its actually quite an irritating bug as apart from this, its an excellent update - even Safari seems massively more reliable and responsive with hardly any "Safari is not responding" messages.
A bug with activities
So I am usually using announce groups mode except for specific cases, such as all the iwork suite and preview where bugs make the other way quite frustrating to use.
For this "standard view" activity I've set it to switch for apps and website pages, keynote, numbers and preview, and only revert back the navigation to standard.
I am multilingual, french and english. For english I always use alison at 100%, for french I ocasionally switch between ameli 100% and eloquence french france at 85%. The bug is that whenever I go in one of the apps mentioned above, the rate will be frozen to 100%, or whatever it is in the voiceover settings activity. Pitch, voice (and probably volume as well) can still be changed with vo shift cmd, but not the rate. The issue is that I am somehow forced to use ameli at 100% or lose 5-10 seconds going to the desktop for example, change the voice there to eloquence and set the speech rate down to 85%, and then return to one of the app.
Am I alone?
Overall Good Release
I have been using Mac OS 15.0 Sequoia for a couple of days now as my main OS and I am very satisfied of how it performs and new features in it.
Especially, I am glad with:
* More stable VoiceOver in general.
* Since I am a heavy terminal user, I am very glad of the more stable version of VoiceOver with terminal app. The keyboard and VoiceOver cursors are well synchronized, i.e. fixed the issue in Mac OS 13 and 14. I also like the more feedback while using Neovim text editor.
* The larger set of commands we can make in VoiceOver using other key combinations not limited to option key. I need to check the podcast to learn even more.
* The separation of arrow quicknav and one key quicknav is good, but needs to be clarified for old users. It was not easy to discover or understand to me.
* Overall more stable Mac OS.
What I am very annoyed about:
* VoiceOver not reading well on preview. I am a researcher, so stability of VoiceOver in reading PDFs is crucial. I hope you fix this specific issue in next versions of Mac OS 15 and not need to continue using Mac OS 13 for that purpose.
* Pressing Capslock twice does not always work. I noticed that it is saying “Capslock off” many times when I do many double presses. Capslock is really turned off (i.e. VoiceOver feedback is correct), but it does not turn on (i.e. can not easily turn it on)!
* VoiceOver stops speaking on Apple Notes occasionally.
* Sometimes, I find arrow keys quicknav on, but the arrows are moving character by character, as if quicknav is turned off.
Terminal and text entry
Up until this point, the impression I was getting was that Terminal was now worse than before with VoiceOver, but maybe it's another one of those things that just varies wildly from one person to the next.
I'm still not entirely convinced that it is going to be better than Sonoma.
How does terminal work well for you?
For me it reads everything from the beginning whenever I press up arrow to go through my past list of commands ran. And the reading of the output is still very very erratic by voiceover.
The worst bug ever in pages
So I had a couple of saved documents open plus one untitled where I copied an entire google docs in it just to test the conversion between both. All documents had tables in them. When in the untitled document I did vo cmd t, the voiceover cursor, for a reason only it can know, moved to a random previous/next document and moved on the first table in there, while the keyboard cursor was still at the beginning of the actual document I was in. With vo fn 2 I had something like, untitled document, the cursor is at the beginning of text, keyboard cursor is in table at x cels. This happened, of course!!! In class when I was actively working on all that stuff real time live.
Users of Intel chips should not upgrade for the time being
Hi all,
I'm currently using a 2020 Macbook Pro equipped with an Intel chip. You heard me right, I'm that particularly unfair user. Just three months after I bought the Mac, Apple released the first Mac equipped with an M chip. So I have been using this Mac in a very tangled state for the past few years. Back to the topic, since updating to Sequoia, I have found that my Mac has become unusable. VoiceOver often automatically restarts. As long as I press the keyboard a little faster, VoiceOver will restart. In order to confirm whether this is a common problem, I tested Macbook Air and Macbook Pro equipped with M2 chip and M3 chip respectively, and found that they did not have this bug. So, if you are still using a Mac equipped with an Intel chip like me, you should carefully consider upgrading the system.
Terminal is indeed incredible
@Mohamed Fayed infinite many thanks, with your help I am now able to do everything I've been dreeming of since I first got my mac. Ncursus interfaces work with the help of vo-s vo-w if needed, a couple of clear screen with ctrl-l cmd-k 100% solve the bug of voiceover reading everything from the beginning when arrowing through the list of past commands, to the point that for the first time ever now I am truly more comfortable on mac terminal than I have ever been with windows. This is wild, I am now happy with my mac and as I can do more and mor (if not everything) with it, I am therefore more tolerant to bugs, and I will again say that for a .0 release voiceover has never been that stable for me, nothing like Sonoma was.
My apologies for some of my negative posts for the past, but for my defence Ventura and Sonoma were horrible with voiceover for the most part and even old users of mac got pretty angry on this website so... And SNR was at its peak an year ago, thus creating a very negative first impression for new users. But yeah!
@applevis I awe a lot to this wonderful community :)
Re: Terminal
So just to be clear, you work around the new bug by clearing the screen? Do you have to keep doing that every time you want to use the command history?
That still sounds quite annoying, particularly if you did want to refer back to something earlier on.
But a least there is some kind of workaround. The only showstopper to me sounds like that punctuation bug. When coding I have to have number verbosity set to digits and if it's just garbling everything with a punctuation symbol that sounds crazy,. @blindguy - do you also experience this problem? I'm guessing it's the kind of thing you might have run into as well.
A small bug with OneDrive
I've just noticed that either you're doing initial setup of the app or adding an account or using it regularly, on 15.0 you have to vo-shift-space on the OneDrive icon in the status bar to access the app otherwise it just says OneDrive has no window and you can't do anything with it. Nothing as crazy as the horrible bug in Sonoma where we were bing locked out of the status bar, but I thought it will be good to post it here. It persists after reboot of the app, I haven't tried to reboot macos yet as I can't turn it off completely for the moment.
As for the initial setup, you enter your email in the regular window at the front but for password you have to find the other window open in the app and only accessible with vo-fn-2-2 and not cmd-`. Just so that you know. It's a very very minor bug.
Menu bar bug
A little bug I forgot to mention and nobody seems to notice is that, if for whatever reason you navigate with vo + arrows in the menu bar (vo-m) and are for example in the Finder submenu, doing vo up arrow to go to the last element from the top will, instead of doing exactly what I just mentioned, going at the bottom of that particular submenu, trigger a click on that first element, in this case About Finder, so you will get the corresponding dialog. Same thing about the File menu of the Finder, which will open a new Finder window. The mouse setting doesn't seem to change this behaviour in any way. Arrowing min the menu bar behaves as expected though.
Edit: this bug also happens with the trackpad.
Sharing from Facebook
Just to say I would really like a way to share images from Facecbook. Am I right in thinking that the workaround would be to save the image locally, or take a screenshot or whatever, then go and find the image to share it with the pixies?
I guess I've always been too lazy to do that. I would love an easier way that doesn't involve me having temp files scattered around my hard disk.
I don't know why the FaceBook app doesn't have the standard share options.
How do you make terminal work?
@Mohamed Fayed I also would like to know how do you make terminal work?
I am on Mac OS 14 right now, and my experience with terminal is, far from perfect, to say the least.
If the voice over handling of terminal is significantly improved, this alone could be my reason of upgrading.
Voice Equalizer is Cool
I've still not had much time to play around with all the new and improved stuff, but one thing which I did manage to briefly check out is in the subject line. I now have the enhanced version of Evan as my primary voice, and played around a bit with a couple of his parameters. I didn't want to do too much, so as not to disturb the neighbors. I think I'm going to bust out my blue-tooth headset even if my audiologist is able to fix my hearing aids today. But anyway...the Voice Equalizer is awesome and it also seems to be available now on iOS.
Terminal
What I do thanks to his advice (awesome guy by the way) is running any command I need to usually. Don't forget that to read the output on the screen you have to interact with the zone first. Then if I really need to repeat a command from the history and voiceover reads from the beginning I do ctrl-l cmd-k so it clears the screen, then I can press up arrow however I want. Voiceover is still erratic when reading new outputs )big or small) from the terminal, and there is this new bug that just started in 15.0 I just described above. For ncursus though, you just put the horisontal/vertical drawing box... symbols in punctuation to be ignored (I have a terminal specific activity for that), and you do vo-s to know precisely which ncursus control the cursor is on, or if there is more than one on the same line such as Okay, Cancel, Back, Exit... like through ssh raspi-config, dietpi-config, dietpi-software, or yet dpkg --reconfigure... you can do vo-w and more or less confidently press enter. I am the first surprised to say that but now I would favor voiceover terminal on macos even with this new bug than nvda on windows, and trust me all when I say that just two weeks ago and before a 1hr zoom meeting with him I would have never said that and felt almost offended :) if someone had said that to me in the first place. I don't have real world terminal experience prior to sequoia because I didn't know who to ask this question back then and after some trial and error I kinda gave up, which was very upsetting for me then because I had bought my mac for the very reason of its native linux/unix/posix (@purists help me here???) backend, but now I feel better than ever with terminal on macos without tdsr and I am able to do all the things I could ever have dreamt of on there. If terminal work, I can confidently code and do all the other geek stuff. VIM, although I am a very beginner, works actually pretty well with voiceover in terms of announcing the text with its navigation commands. I use nano for the sake of familiarity and I am just more comfortable with it for the moment though.
Now if someone could give me an up to date tutorial about how to install a working version of emacsspeak on macos (sorry if it's off topic please pm me), I will be very happy about that.
Punctuation
When you say you are ignoring punctuation, do you have a custom punctuation set configured?
I've never found that custom punctuation sets work with activities. Has this now been fixed at last? Or are you doing it a different way?
iPhone mirroring and other un accessible services
Another kind of an accessibility which I’m thinking of, next to million of other people not being lucky enough to live in United States, it is the way how Apple decided to offer some services based on region. I consider this being a huge in equity considering. Those many are the millions are paying the same price or even higher for their devices and have limited access to services which are paid with same amounts of money. For example, iPhone mirroring will be not available in Europe. May I name Apple and other big IT industry players creating a kind of an accessible place for many millions of people? And the hilarious thing is all of them are playing. The equality and accessibility cards quite vocal.
Alternate context menu shortcut
Apparently you can now use ctrl+enter to open up the context menu instead of VO+Shift+M or the right click menu. Not strictly speaking an accessibility thing but it feels about time that there was a native shortcut to do this considering that Windows has a button on the keyboard entirely devoted to it. (Or did anyway...)
Better late than never
The global context menu shortcut and ability to customize every single VoiceOver command are things that should have been there a long time ago, but better late than never I suppose. Can we finally use Spaces like we do in Windows 10/11? I want Command Tab to only cycle through applications on the current desktop, not all. If things are still the same as they were in Big Sur, this feature isn't practical for VoiceOver users.
Re: Alternate context menu shortcut
I agree that it is about time Apple added a dedicated systemwide hot key for Context menus. You are right, that Windows has had this availability for years, not just with the Applications key, but for keyboards that do not have such a key, we have the shift plus F10 alternative. That works for pretty much all versions of Windows. It is nice to see Apple finally updating some of their hardcoded hot keys. :-)