Sorry to copy the other post's title.
So I have this little base model m2pro macbook 14 inch, on which I have just created a new APFS volume for testing, and will be installing the developer beta on this partition very soon. I hope creating another centralized thread for accessibility bugs / bugs in general, with feedback numbers.
My disappointment with mac, since I bought one, has been unfortunately huge in many area, particularely how voiceover and its accessibility structure seems more unstable than what I've ever heard about Windows Vista with each update.
Now negativity aside, I am a free (and somehow happily broke) student who just finished his semester and has plenty of free time besides looking for jobs, so I hope that this way I can at least start writing this detailed bug report macos deserves about its accessibility, and that Apple can at least make the most urgent changes to this new version. From what I understand, for voiceover users, although the quality has apparently been degradating over the years, macOS 13 and 14 were somehow one of the worst, so I had a bad luck and timing when I bought my espensive device that has been the cause of many headache for me and probably many others. :) So good luck to me and all the others who will be trying this!
All my hopes go to the calculator accessibility on mac!
By TheBllindGuy07, 11 June, 2024
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Apple Beta Releases
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Comments
Change Log
If Sequoia includes a change log similar to iOS 18, please post it here. The list in 18 is quite extensive, and I'm curious if macOS has received the same level of attention.
Copycats are still fun cats
Not to worry! I was actually sort of hoping someone might copy the thread for other platforms. These are important issues we need to keep track of/address.
macOS 15.0 developer beta 1 being installed
Hey!
As of writing (on windows), I am waiting for ... oh, voiceover has just been activated on the installer! I had a problem installing the sonoma stable on another partition from within the existent one yesterday and felt lazy to use recovery, but now... ok it's been installed! :)
Will give you my updates when I can.
This is so awesome!
Okay.
Dear applevis user, let me share with you ma excitement. The voiceover customizable shortcuts thing we heard is almost surreal. Aside the usual expected chunk of bugs that I will detail later, let me tell you that the first thing I've been able to do and that was a dream is that now we can customize virtually any shortcut with the vo modifier, plus everything with the trackpad, commander, quicknav and numpad we are already able to do. So I was able to do vo f12 for time, and vo shift b for battery status. I let you dream and sleep peacefully on this note.
Quick warning, *do* not install this beta on your main partition, I have installed sonoma 14.5 on another partition and this one on a smaller one. I will detailed this later but like we can't navigate by headings on this website with vo command h or quicknav h. (edit, after just a reboot of safari this isn't true at all but my warning is still there) This is the only thing I have tested. Didn't see any voice.
Oh and we can now have different input and output braille tables too.
...
I thought we could already…
I thought we could already do such shortcuts using keyboard commander? I've got right option T for the time, right option P for power etc...
I kinda feel we're being sold old rope here.
Re: customising keyboard shortcuts
That feels like a support nightmare to me. I think part of the problem with the Mac is that it is already so crazy flexible that it makes it a lot harder to figure out what is going on.
I did not realise you can have multiple macos versions on different partitions.
Anyway good luck with the beta - I'll be keeping an eye on this with a lot of interest.
Anyway apologies for short tangent - carry on!
No we couldn't
modified any command with the vo key(s) and now we can.
A quick short list
VO-J is as crazy as it was on sonoma
The new calculator has promissing beginings in the sense that there is no speech option altogether which will at least force apple to do what they should have done 10 years ago. There is this weird edit field and history is shown on the left with unlabeled buttons for voiceover for each result so far but it can still be seen in the result section just before the calculator buttons.
Some minor wording and exthetic change to voiceover utility.
Haven't yet explored the voice section but from what I understand now the rotor will have primary and secondary voices like on ios/ipados **from what I can understand after 30 seconds**.
The nstextview issues I've mentioned about pages notes and etc on another thread are still 100% There.
Voiceover is still not accurate when navigating by landmarks, it doesn't seem to follow the dom order in which they are shown and written with vo-cmd -n and its backward equivalent.
Terminal is as unreliable as it has apparently always been with voiceover reading the output.
Has anyone tried the iPhone mirroring feature yet?
Hi there,
Has anyone tried the iPhone mirroring feature yet? I'm curious to find out how accessible it is with VoiceOver
@JC
According to at least mkbhd this is not available yet, and even if it were to be there I couldn't test it as I only have one (main) iphone able to run ios 18 which I am not going to sacrifice for testing (assuming the iphone also will require ios18 which we don't know yet?) :)
Activities
So I know there was a bug with switching activities with voiceover on sonoma, although I never understood its sevarity and how spread out it was.
What I can say though is we can finally toggle vo modifier per activity. I had control option and caps lock on finder and when I switched to safari, it switched to the text activity I had created and configured for switching into when in safari, and voiceover only had caps lock as a modifier.
This has like huge positive implications for google docs and windows virtual machines.
OK
OK. guess I'll try it when it becomes available.
Any improvements to eloquence?
Are there any improvements to eloquence? I hope at some point they fix the higher sample rate.
Ah, so the difference is we…
Ah, so the difference is we can assign different keys, the vo key, to work as a modifier to fire up things we can already do? It's kinda streamlined it into one button press, which should have been there, rather than having to use option on the other side of the space bar...
It's pretty tragic if this is the best mac os accessibility upgrade. I really think mac is a sideline for apple these days.
The idea of being able to have my iPhone on the desktop, however, does sound pretty groovy. I'm wondering if we can use the IOS TV app with all the up next etc, if we can use the far better version of whatsapp on IOS instead of the junk one for mac. If we can now, in fact, use any IOS app that has better accessibility than its mac counterpart, kinda making the mac the inverse of a headless machine, basically a terminal for IOS and, I'd imagine down the line, iPad. If so, that's a very clever move as what we are, in fact doing, is using our mac as a docking system for our portable devices. Neat.
@Ollie
Can you please re explain your first paragraph? Not very clear.
But yeah none of the critical bugs have been fixed except *maybe* for activity switching. Like do they even realize that they have each function/vo script repeted twice if not more? We have like 4 different ways to access the rotor and depending on the app none of them work properly.... The navigation design is just flawed at this point.
Yeah 101% agree for iphone. But I feel so sad, I do wanna like macos the os is so cool and it is becoming even better this year! But voiceover won't let me.
Bugs
Siri interface is not very accessible, now we have the talk to siri button, than a scroll area which voiceover cycles over and over within when interacting but is never able to let us navigate through the items there.
The math note feature seems to be... not bad in terms of accessibility, just the usual non-web math content bug which is present across all the iwork suite.
When assigning a shortcut (in my case vo f12) to "announce time", (I don't know if it's a bug or something wrong I did), voiceover keeps switching it to "announce time and date". Announce date works perfectly though when assigned (vo shift f12).
They were able to make voiceover even more confusing with how it poorly manage their already clottered navigation scripts assigned to gestures. At least now I can assign vo fn up-down (the arrows, page up page down) to the proper scrolling script that we have with trackpad 3 fingers up and down, but when in a slider for example (an when this slider work somehow, like the screen brightness, keyboard brightness and sound in control centre) it's not smart enough to switch it back to the usual default behaviour of vo page up page down. It sounds as confusing as I wrote it, you have to experience this.
I really can't remember so I'll just edit it but if it's not already there now we can hide the dot 7-8 as cursor for braille displaies although we are still unable to vary its blinking speed or if it should altogether.
The system settings which seems quite the same than sonoma from a voiceover user perspective aside some wording change (apple account, mdm in general...), still has sluggishness with voiceover compared to ventura to the point that I regularely get system settings does not respond when reseting my mac and changing settings - apparently too quickly for the poor old screen reader that's helping me there.
No idea about snr I haven't tried safari enough but the reader button is not accessible with voiceover. And whatever they've done with webkit (if they did anything with webkit at all) they just corrected (slightly) the symptoms, I am further convinced that the problem is between the begining of the 1000 api calls to the accessibility infrastructire behind voiceover until it sends the "$app does not respond" output to the tts.
So, in voiceover you can go…
So, in voiceover you can go to commanders, then keobyard, and you can assign a modifier key, option or command I think, and then choose a key and latch it to a shortcut from the shortcuts app, a function of voiceover, a script and so on. Basically, as far as I understand it, just what the new thing does only one can use the Vo modifier key rather than the option or command that one would use otherwise.
It's no greater functionality, just a streamlining of control.
Yeah..
I think I got it. But we can also modify most of the existent ones too like what I did for scrolling.
I hope
that I am not the only one testing this, please report bugs here! :) It's much easier to test a mac apple have a good tutorial about dualboot mac-mac.
Re: Activities in Sonoma
The early versions of Sonoma basically broke VO+X so manually switching activities was practically useless. Now it is better but still a bit broken if you have an app that automatically switches activity.
Basically VO+X changes the default activity now.
So I have Mail and Safari using default VO activity, and PyCharm using a Coding activity.
If I am in Mail and switch to my Slow Down activity it stays locked. If I go to Safari it is still using Slow Down. If I go to PyCharm it switches to Coding. So far this is fine but slightly different to Ventura.
If I am in PyCharm and switch to my Indentation activity (so it speaks indentation as opposed to beeping) and I then change focus in any way - e.g. using VO+left/right, bringing up a dialog or jumping to a panel, then it will switch back to Coding. If I then switch over to Mail or Safari it will still be using the Indentation activity.
So it's a little broken but it works well enough for most things I do so I've never bothered to go back to Apple with it. I think it was caused by the new way to switch activity by context - I guess every time focus changes it checks if it need to change activity.
So not sure if this behaviour has changed again in Sequoia? (It will be a miracle if I have managed to spell that correctly)
You can do all the voiceover…
You can do all the voiceover actions with the original keyboard commander. I get what your'e saying, but it's a very small and subtle change that brings it in line with IOS shortcuts. My point remains that, if this is the headline voiceover improvement, well, that says a lot. It's nothing new.
I will get on the beta but need some compelling reason to do so. As it stands, without AI, iPhone mirroring or, as I understand it, the proofing and rewriting features active, I would rather struggle on with the failure I already know. I doubt there will be any improvement in voiceover. There hasn't been for the last several years and see it at the end of its lifecycle.
Re: changing VO shortcuts
Got to agree with you, this does feel like a pointless feature. But I also think it is a bad idea to change these things. For one, it means if you go to a different Mac then you might find yourself totally unable to use it. But also if you are trying to raise a support ticket or talk to someone else about how to do something, if all the keyboard shortcuts are different it becomes very difficult to reason with. I use numpad commander for everything, but if I am reporting an issue I will always reproduce with the normal VO commands and document it that way. I think it is better to train yourself on the default way of working, but then use the commanders when you want to make things more personal. But maybe that's just me.
Oh I know
how bad voiceover is. I bought my mac in 2023 and trust me when I say that I feel as safe on the sequoia beta 1 dev after less than 1 day than 14.5, or as unsafe as... Did I mentioned that the recognition section is still the same as ventura and sonoma? If they know vocr they are not interested at all in making it native...
A very important note for beta testers
Hey,
So I actually took a huge risk yesterday when downloading and installing the beta 1 before even reading the release notes.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-15-release-notes
Basically it says this, under voiceover --> known issues.
Users might not be able to complete some stages of Setup Assistant. (127445421)
Workaround: Press Command + Shift + Q to quit setup.
It's quite vague in my opinion. But it's true that after the update was doing its things voiceover after a reboot was only saying installer progress has no windows. With seeing ai and voiceover off I could see that there was a progress bar that voiceover couldn't access. After quite awhile 10-15 minutes when I was slightly starting panicking... The thing rebooted and I was able to type my password.
What is true even for 14.5 that I re installed on another partition is that either from the install macos xxx.app internally or via recovery assistant, the select a disk where to install is indeed not very accessible with voiceover, you can't interact with it and change it but for whatever reason with left and right arrow keys you can do that. Same thing for the user selection it just says image, and you have to press space then the checkbox for copying configuration become visible to voiceover. As I only have one user account I can't say whether others how to navigate between users within the setup.
Default versus custom command sets
While the high level of command customizability could indeed make it difficult for support technicians to respond to VoiceOver-related tickets from users, one thing that could possibly make this easier is the ability to revert to the default command set in VoiceOver Utility > Commands. What I'm not sure of at this point is if after clicking the "Default" radio button, the user can later simply click the "custom" radio button to immediately reenable their customizations, or if they will need to manually reconfigure them. I'd assume clicking a single radio button in VoiceOver Utility wouldn't erase all a user's customizations, but I've not tested this yet.
@Tyler
Yes, after reverting to default and then back to custom commands all the user assigned ones will work again.
PS: Is it just me or the table view is more understandable than the grid one?
Re: VO Utility
Yes that will probably work and can be very helpful for trying to narrow down problems that seemingly can't be reproduced anywhere else.
For me personally though it is too much effort - both just adding an extra step to reporting issues and also trying to remember both old and new shortcuts. Just feels like there are better ways to do this sort of thing already. I think I've only setup half of the shortcuts I can assign to numpad commander.
Anyway we'll see - if you are getting benefit out of it then maybe it isn't as useless a feature as I think it is!
A minor change in safari
(not talking about snr)
You know how opening a new tab is such a tidious task with voiceover and 2/3 you have to interact (in quick nav) or right arrow in a link's text and then press command return? Well now you still have to do that part of replacing the cursor properly on the link, but voiceover seems consistently announce that a tab has actually been open in background.
Now about snr yes it's still there and a bit more than sonoma 14.5. Funnily enough it once said safari does not respond, please press command option escape to leave a busy page (or something along those lines), otherwise just safari does not respond.
VoiceOver Tutorial
A friend installed the beta, and from the little bit I was able to hear, it appears Apple updated the tutorial to match the experience in iOS. If this and the customizable keyboard commands are the only changes, this is very disappointing indeed, but not at all surprising. The tutorial is an example of Apple doing things well, but that's only one example. It doesn't matter. I'm done purchasing products from this company, and will only consider it once the leadership changes for the better, and they start taking accessibility, user choice, and user freedom seriously. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen, but I can hope.
snr's bit of an update...
so, when browsing the web, I got this message. "Safari is not responding. Press Control Option Escape to jump out of a busy web page."
Pressing control+option+esc caused vo to stop responding and it came back when I pressed command+tab and jumped to the next app. I assume this feature will get better over time.
And about the setup issue, I saw that after I updated but it hasn't affected me.
P.S., I hate the "Installer Progress has no windows" thing. It is so annoying!
@Levi
Agree on all points :) and had the exact same ecxperience.
well at least we get the...
Well at least we get the message that safari is not responding along with the keyboard shortcut to jump out of a busy page. I'm sure it'll improve overtime throughout the beta cycle.
Impossible to reliably click add event and add reminder buttons
FB13889815
When VoiceOver / keyboard focus is placed on "New event" or "New reminder"button in the calendar app, VoiceOver interacts out of the pop over, making it impossible to click these buttons.
Context
In the calendar app, when
- pressing command+n
- Or going to the toolbar, interacting with it and pressing (VO space) the button labeled as "New event" and "New reminder" are shown, as well as the text element "Create a quick event" and the corresponding edit field with the placeholder "New Quick Event Movie at 7pm on Friday"; edit text, from left to right respectively with VO + left and right arrow keys
Bug
- Expected behaviour: voiceover should not interacts out of the popover and let the user click this button with VO space or go left and right with VO + corresponding arrow keys
- Bug encountered: Voiceover, when the keyboard cursor / VoiceOver cursor is placed on "New reminder" or "New event" button, interacts out of the pop over, effectively making it impossible for the user to click thee buttons.
Other information relevant to the bug
When using both combination of Quick nav at the same time or just single key quick nav and pressing command+n, or interacting in the toolbar and pressing the "Add event" button, it is impossible to move by any of the arrow keys as quick nav would usually allows to, and VoiceOver makes the sound of 'Command not supported' or 'Limit reached' as referenced in the Sounds Help menu accessed with VO+h and four times arrow down. It is also impossible to drag a finger on the trackpad when trackpad commander on to focus on the button, and the same sound is produced. When swiping left or right on the trackpad the same bug occurs. However, when cursor tracking is off, all of the methods described above work as intended and VoiceOver no longer interacts out of the pop over. When this bug happens however, voiceover does not interacts out of the pop over when it is autofocuses on the first "New event" button.
Agree with cris
Not mutch else to add really, Mac sounds like it sucks, iPadOS is not mutch better, voiceover is crashing so mutch for me, I get I am on beta 1 but I don’t have high hopes of this being fixt but we will see how it goes throughout the rest of the betas
The IOS beta, compared with…
The IOS beta, compared with previous years, is pretty slick. Yeah, there is some voiceover drop out but a restart fixes it. I'm quite impressed. Voiceover dropping out will be quickly fixed too.
Some bug fixes
Basically if you open voiceover user guide and try performing some of the things related with the rotor (all rotor, command vo left right up down, vo u rotor, trackpad gesture rotor...), pinch selection on trackpad, the bug especially noticeable on sonoma 14.5 where voiceover with either of the rotor doesn't navigate properly to the next rotor element (e.g.: characters or words) or selecting/announcing selection with pinch gesture and trackpad rotor, these bugs seemed to be solved at least in this beta and in the help interface. I don't really know how to explain ti better as those bugs are very very clever and difficult to track, like the level of micro details needed to reproduce them is insane. I am not sure but as far as I know the quick nav and always allow typing in text fields *seems* to be gone. I will test further and let you know.
Trackpad Commander
If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that a lot of the macOS Sonoma Trackpad Commander gesture issues are now working in Sequoia?
Mackos15
I am running macOS 15 on my MacBook Air M1. I’m facing voice stuttering issue with eloquence and other voices, speech stopping for no reason, safari not responding, and Yeah, but overall really like it
report report report
I encourage all that are running the betas keep reporting the bugs. The more that test and report the better the chance they will get fixed.
The latest developments with Sequoia
Hello,
I notice this forum hasn't seen a post for about a week, and it looks like a good majority of the important stuff has been posted here, but I did the thing you should never do and opted to run the beta on my main device, as for 1, I don't have anything to test with, and for 2, I feel I get a lot more out of it if I use it on a device I use every day, rather than something I might only touch once a week or month. I have a few things to mention from the latest and maybe even earlier betas.
• If you use a Vocaliser Expressive voice like Daniel, your voice still won't read repeated letters if there are four or more. So X X X X X (That had spaces in it) will read as XX. This has been a thing since Sonoma beta 1, and same with iOS 17, and continues to be a problem. I understand Apple trying to make things less spammy, but surely this could be a setting?
• The VoiceOver Utility has been reworked a bit. The speech tab now has a "primary voice" then rotor voices. I notice all the options for having different voices depending on context have disappeared, somebody please explain to me if I have missed something. This also means that automatic language switching, for those who read multi-lingual text, is contained as its own setting now and cannot be changed any other way than through VoiceOver Utility, as far as I can tell anyway. This is currently bugged. As of beta 3, VoiceOVer will respect your voice for the language, but all other settings such as rate and pitch do not change with the text language. I'm not sure if this is meant to be deliberate but I believe it is useful to put this in anyway. If it were deliberate, shouldn't there be a setting that lets us decide whether we want per-voice settings?
• Command assignments. I saw this one was a bit divisive, with people saying that modifying default key bindings had no use. I can see a use for it, but it, well, doesn't work yet. So by default, caps lock and F7 will read the time and date if pressed once. Well, when I hear the time, I would like to hear seconds, which will not happen by default. Thus, I have an applescript that gives the hours, minutes and seconds, just like it should. In theory, you should then be able to remap V O F7 to use that script. However, I don't think that's been sorted yet. Currently you will still get the command unavailable sound, even after a VoiceOver restart. I have not tried a system restart yet. It could also be to do with the fact that the applescript is currently in iCloud. But other than applescripts, it might just be that there are current things that haven't been assigned that you would like to assign to V O + something. Okay, the keyboard commander (Which has now been re-named to option key commands,) or the numpad or trackpad commanders are good, but they could be considered quite limiting, particularly now as we can no longer use option + space bar, or other combinations like that. Just letters, numbers and symbols. Thankfully beta 3 adds compatibility with option + shift + letter or number, not just option + letter or number, but there is still a way to go before I would say it's ready.
• Notifications did not read in beta 2. They do now, but in order to interact with them from the notification centre, you must interact with the notification first. Even stacked ones, you must press V O shift down arrow to interact, then V O space on the content to activate it. V O space without interacting will show details for the notification rather than open it in the app.
• IPhone mirroring does not work at all with VoiceOver. I have written to Apple about this one. They released the ability in beta 2, and for us as VoiceOver users, although there is full keyboard control, the whole point is that the phone should be locked. Unlocking the phone with the keyboard, listening to VoiceOVer, results in the disconnection from the mirroring session owing to the phone having been unlocked. So far, we can't do anything with VoiceOver. I expect this is because of the way the screen is done. It is not physically controlling the phone in the same way that a remote access tool would, it works in a way, I guess like the apple watch mirror on the iPhone. Although, to those who have tried that, you will find that, though it's not perfect, VoiceOver works with that, whereas it doesn't at all on MacOS. I guess we will see how that goes in the future.
I am sorry that this is such a long post, and I hope it is of at least a bit of use for those thinking about using Sequoia. There are some nice new sounds for quicknav and the tutorial now is a lot more modern, with it giving you a single instruction to follow at a time rather than being told about everything at once and then you "practicing" it. But of all the issues that have always been present, such as the awful thing that is MacOS drag and drop, none of that good stuff has been fixed.
Good news about pdfs!
I don't know anyone tried it yet but I installed the public beta on my M 1 macbook air, which is my secondery mac and I can confirm that reading pdf is now a delight. Last year, apple was fixed the continous reading bug however voiceover was randomly skiping some text bloks. I sent feedback reports about this and it seems they fixed the bug.
Good to know. For mac the…
Good to know.
For mac the main device argument doesn't really matter, I just created a second partition with sequoia on it and my primary one... well now is on the beta of sonoma 14.6 but you see my point.
Just discovered a clever…
Just discovered a clever thing.
You know this bug that seems to be present since forever about when you read a long text with visual line break (or I assuming using the html <br /> tag?) where voiceover will read the last word of the current line with option right and then skip the next word (first word of next line) altogether? Well now it concatenates both words. Horrible and lazy patch but guess it's better than skiping a word altogether.
And the bug with always…
And the bug with always allow typing when single key quick nav is on... that insanely wordy bug? Seems to be fixed on the latest developer beta.
Pages got little fixes!?
Hello applevis,
I'm running sequoia beta 4 on another partition. The bug where voiceover would randomly announce partial text attributes when moving word by word with option left or right arrow seem to be completly fixed. Also, voiceover does not read at all any symbols like comma or period when navigating that way. With how broken this feature was it's probably a good thing, at least it is in my book.
@Cankut Değerli please, we already have this dedicated thread about macos sequoia beta, why creating 2 separate topics to report your bugs? Please be nice and post them hear and ask applevis editorial team to remove your topics. It will be easier for everyone to follow.
Re: just discovered a clever...
This partial fix mentioned above is back and voiceover skip the first word of the next line when doing option right arrow.
Edit, see 2 messages below.
Are you serious?
Voiceover, again, won't announce the element under focus when pressing vo+d to go to the dock.
Edit, see 1 message below.
Ignore both messages above
I was on the wrong partition as I didn't install 1password on the sequoia beta so I needed to get the password from the 14.6 rc partition. Sorry guys :) 😂
any accessibility status on iPhone mirroring with VoiceOver?
Hi there, Any accessibility status on iPhone Mirroring with VoiceOver? or is it still the same.
No, unfortunately as far as…
No, unfortunately as far as I was able to try it it's still completely unusable for us. Very frustrating yes especially that when iphone notifications are pushed to mac and we click on one it automatically open the iphone miroring app.