Annoying VoiceOver Bug in MacOS Big Sur

By Ishkabibble, 16 November, 2020

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi,

I updated to MacOS Big Sur a few days ago and have started noticing this really annoying bug that people haven't talked about yet. I have different voices selected for my VoiceOver and system speech, and occasionally when I toggle VoiceOver off and back on again, VoiceOver will start alternating between my VoiceOver voice and the system voice (which is set at an obnoxiously low speech rate). For instance, the first item I scroll to would be spoken in my VoiceOver voice, the next item in the system voice I've selected, and so on. The only consistent trigger for this bug that I've figured out is that it starts acting up after I have to disable and re-enable VoiceOver for some reason, otherwise, the behavior is very inconsistent and arbitrary. Does anyone know what is causing this to happen and how I can fix it? I'm running a 2020 13 inch MacBook Pro if that clears anything up.

Thanks!

Sincerely,
Maddy

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Comments

By flcomputergeek on Saturday, January 2, 2021 - 18:19

I've noticed this when I set the voiceover voice to the British male siri premium voice. Voiceover speaks far slower than I've set the rate at, then the default system voice kicks in at maximum pitch. The british siri female and siri male conpact voices doe not behave in this manner, nor do the nuance voices. I tried setting the voiceover voice and the system voice to siri male british, which caused voiceover to crash relentlessly.

By Ishkabibble on Saturday, January 2, 2021 - 18:19

Thank you so much for your reply. I was starting to think this was a one-off bug only I was affected with. I have Alex set as my VO voice and Ava (Nuance) set as my system voice. I haven't been able to switch voices for some reason because my computer is being stubborn, I'll have to try out some different combinations and report back with my findings.