macOS 26 Tahoe beta 2 released

By TheBlindGuy07, 23 June, 2025

Forum
Apple Beta Releases

Let's share our findings there.

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Comments

By Levi Gobin on Monday, June 23, 2025 - 22:49

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

The Community dictionary is fixed in iOS 26.

By JC on Tuesday, June 24, 2025 - 03:47

1. the automix feature has made it's way into the music app on macOS as well, so you can easily listen to how a song transitions
2. The notification options in the messages settings for screening calls are correctly labeled and voiceover now properly reads them. In the previous beta it was not accessible and the labels were not read properly forcing you to use VO shift L to read the labeled options.
3. The customize voice option once again works when announce the time option is on. You can once again customize the voice to your prefered choice. also, you can even enable the higher sample rate for your prefered eloquence voice of choice when announce the time option is on.
4. You can once again press the FN key to toggle dictation. Unfortunately when you speak an emoji, eloquence reads the emoji as spelled. But nevertheless, it still inserts the emoji even though eloquence unfortunately spells out the emoji. That's a bug, so hopefully that will get resolved in the third beta.

Over all, not bad so far. Continue to send feedback to apple.

By Oliver on Tuesday, June 24, 2025 - 04:32

Couple of new parts to screen sharing in the VO utility menu:

If remote device has VoiceOver on: Options are all commands control remote device (or) most commands control remote device. Not entirely sure what this means.

Also, a choice for whether it is silent or voiceover chatters whilst taking control of the remote device.

Interesting it uses the term (device). Is this going to allow us to control IOS devices too? Can't imagine so but they usually use the term 'computer'.

By Oliver on Tuesday, June 24, 2025 - 04:37

Still getting an issue with voiceover reverting to default in activities.

I need to get a bunch of feedback done when I get a chance. Just listing here for other's info.

By TheBlindGuy07 on Tuesday, June 24, 2025 - 06:00

Yeah, me too. I have like 18+ feedbacks from beta 1 to file to apple in Reminders. I have installed it but haven't even gotten the time to even reboot yet.

By TheBlindGuy07 on Tuesday, June 24, 2025 - 06:03

Please all send all the text weirdness with Vo, it's our chance to get them priotized at least, like just all the variants of issues with paragraph navigation and vo, as on example. As of beta 1 at least (hope there's no regression) scrolling's been fixed, something that was so broken on the trackpad when I first booted my first mac on Ventura. And in Sequoia they did a lot in nstextview for iwork apps and notes, so...

By PaulMartz on Tuesday, June 24, 2025 - 18:39

Here are text issues present in Sequoia and almost certainly present in the beta. If you can reproduce these in the beta, please submit a feedback report. I've submitted feedback reports on release MacOS to no effect.

* VoiceOver often skips the initial part of a word or phrase. Workaround is to have VoiceOver repeat last phrase.
* Read by paragraph issues with short paragraphs. Shortcuts are VO+Shift+PageUp and PageDown. Incorrect behavior varies based on the text you're editing, but might consist of: 1, skipping some paragraphs; 2, refusing to read trailing paragraphs and instead behaving as if focus is at the end of the document; 3, reading different paragraphs depending on whether your reading next or previous paragraphs. Easy to reproduce in TextEdit when single-line paragraphs are present.
* Problems reading by word with complex words (words connected with symbols, as is common in software, web development, and even describing shortcuts such as VO+Shift+PageDown). Moving by word with Option arrow fails to read the word you've navigated past, and instead reads the entire complex word, making it impossible to know where your text cursor has landed. Option+Left arrow doesn't suffer from this issue. Easy to reproduce right here in the comment box, and no workaround.

Thanks.

By TheBlindGuy07 on Tuesday, June 24, 2025 - 20:41

I will say this again, don't install beta software on a production device, or, at the very least, in the case of macos, on your main volume. At least have backups ready.
Okay so now the problem is that I had this very critical bug, fully and easily reproducible 4-5 times, but now I am not able to reproduce it while I was testing everything live and writing the feedback at the same time. I will write what I had and you can let me know if you've seen this or not. I expect general system instability, so I am not sure if this is just another edge case I don't get anymore.
When I open the TextEdit app on macOS 26 Tahoe developer beta 2 with VoiceOver on, the following unexpected behaviours happen. Note that my system is set to not sync textedit with iCloud, so a new empty document is opened. The problems were observed with both .rtf and .txt files. The expected behaviour is that the app functions normally, with no crash ro slowdowns from VoiceOver inside or outside the app.
First, VoiceOver becomes silent. Then, after a couple of seconds, it may say the welcome message like if VoiceOver had partially rebooted, by default and in my case it’s something like
Welcome to macOS, VoiceOver is on.
When I navigate in the app either by the VO modifiers + arrow keys, VO doesn’t announce anything, or it announce “edit text” sometimes for example but it’s very, very slow and laggy.
When I do command tab quickly enough after the TextEdit app opens and this bug starts, I am sometimes able to switch to another app or to the finder and then so long as I don’t go back into TextEdit the rest of the system works normally.
My only option is to force quit the app with command + option + escape key. Note that this only seems to me a VoiceOver bug, as in the force quit window the app TextEdit itself doesn’t show as not responding to the right of the app name.
Another more critical crash observed is that if I wait for too long before switching to another app and then invoking the force quit window (after opening TextEdit), VoiceOver becomes completely unresponsive even after multiple reboots with either command + f5, or via the accessibility menu (on my MacBook Pro m2 pro 512gb ram 16gb unified memory 14 inch, triple click Touch ID button). My only solution then is to do a brute force shutdown of the system by holding Touch ID until I hear a very subtle sound in my earphones, then start the Mac normally.
I tried to see if this issue occurs only with TextEdit or anything with NSTextView, but Notes and Pages open as usual and I am able to use both app with VoiceOver on normally as well as the rest of the system.
I am unaware if there are visual glitches in the TextEdit app and if the problem is with that app itself or the way it communicates with VoiceOver and something fails along the way.
Also please note that I am able to open an existing document, .txt or .rtf, containing some text, and then everything works as expected from reading, navigating with VoiceOver inside and outside TextEdit and even editing that file. I am even able to remove al the content and no crash is observed.
The crash also happens when there is no document opened at all, IE the app is opened but doesn’t have any window.

By TheBlindGuy07 on Tuesday, June 24, 2025 - 20:43

Otherwise, no patch from the first beta has been broken, scrolling still works.
For this notification bug, if it's the same thing we're talking about it's been there since 15.2 or 15.3, and basically you can either use the trackpad sometimes by dragging your finger and go to a notification to get its action menu after with vo cmd space, or revert back to the standard grouping behaviour where this doesn't happen.
The four developer options are still only accessible via a braille display or braille keyboard input.