Since I upgraded to MacOS 15.5, when VoiceOver encounters a forward slash ('/'), it announces it as "solidus." This happens regardless of voice. I've encountered this in the Mac Mail app but not elsewhere. When I copy the text in question and paste it into TextEdit, voiceOver announces it as "slash." Same behavior in the AppleVis text box.
Does anyone know why this change was made apparently only to the native Mac Mail client? Clearly, I can add a pronunciation entry. But, for sanity's sake, I'd just like to understand what on earth Apple is thinking.
Comments
I have seen this too in some cases
where I first noticed it was when I named a file with / characters in it in Finder. It happened there too, and like you said, copying the character shows it is a regular / character.
Different text API?
I wonder if the solidus issue is API specific. Mail, Finder, and anything else with the solidus issue is using one text API, and TextEdit, my browser, Scrivener, and anything else that doesn't exhibit this issue is using some other text API. But I have no idea how I would confirm this hypothesis.
Submitting a feedback report.
Can't create a reproducer case
I'm not going to open a feedback report because I wasn't able to reproduce this, not by sending myself an email with the slash character, nor by adding a slash to a file name in Finder. Levi, if you have a way to reproduce it, please open a feedback report. Thanks.
Solidus is actually another name.
I got curious. Apparently it is a name for the slash char. I wonder if it's just one of those things where we call it a number sign usually, but it can be pound or technically an octothorpe, or nowadays hashtag? The "and"sign for instance is called ampersand, at least with Eloquence. So it seems like Apple does sometimes use the more technical names for characters.
Maybe Unicode's falt?
I can't say for certain why the issue exists, but I hypothesize it has something to do with the Unicode character database. For context, Unicode, the standard that allows computers to work seamlessly with text from different languages and scripts, gives names to each and every character, and sure enough, the "/" character appears as "solidus" there. Thus I can conclude that Apple is likely using the Unicode database to retrieve names of unfamiliar characters, and sometimes "/" happens to be one of them.