The state of VoiceOver for macOS: from superior to suppressed

I started my mac journey in 2023. And oh my gosh there were things to learn, adapt, or worst, accept as it or use linux shell alternative (text).
I am also very very interested in the answers.
To give credit where credit is due.
Again, even if it's positive spamming from me, I couldn't thank João Santos enough, even if he may not even remember.
It's only thanks to him that I felt that I was not alone being frustrated by seeing the horrible design / systemic problems of VoiceOver on mac. It's 90% because of him I originally had the motivation to beta test on my mac and provide feedbacks here and / or to apple.
Despite the real pains, I've become more educated than I was before getting my mac about accessibility and its meaning for us long term.

Snow leopard was the most stable out of many updates that were released! That and Mountain Lyon, After that is when stuff started to hit the fan as it were. I also do not care what people say about VM. Bootcamp is the most superior experience you're gunna get with windows. Not none of this VM garbage. I'll stick with my 2015 macbook pro for as long as I can just for that reason and reason alone. You can't do as much on a VM as you can with bootcamp and I use a lot of stuff that you cannot do with a VM by far.

I went blind in 2014 so have no experience with VoiceOver or any other screen reader whatsoever from before then, my daily driver back then was a late-2011 apex 15" MacBook Pro, and those first years of VoiceOver were quite rough. Things have actually been improving slowly, but very old bugs from that time still linger, and while some stability issues may result from the architecture switch, the reason for that is just bad code.

In terms of web navigation, back then you couldn't even do anything even close to caret browsing meaning that reading code on a web page was an exercise in patience, browsing any reddit thread with close to or more than 50 comments would consistently make Safari grind to a halt, and most of the problems felt today were already present. In terms of sound, audio ducking was a total train wreck since VoiceOver would often duck itself instead of everything else, which up to this day I still think that it takes a special level of incompetence to accomplish. Stability was also pretty bad, to the point that the simple act of writing code in Xcode would cause random and frequent screen-reader crashes, the `NSTextView` problem in which only the text in the same visible line as the caret is reported to accessibility was already manifesting. Features like indentation announcement weren't even a thing yet so I just avoided Python and YAML. So yes,, things were already bad 11 years ago.

The accessibility infrastructure on macOS is a fractal of bad design. The API itself derives from the Carbon framework, which was introduced to ease the transition from classic macOS to macOS X, however it fails to provide thread-safety even in situations when Carbon itself makes thread-safety mandatory or at least reasonable to expect. Then there's the blocking design in which every accessibility call prevents its thread from doing anything else while waiting for applications to respond, which makes no sense at all considering that all the frameworks that the accessibility infrastructure depends on provide an asynchronous interface to the Mach Ports used for inter-process communication. At a higher level, Apple seems to make a very liberal use of all kinds of accessibility identifiers, many of which they even stopped declaring so in some cases the only way to discover them is through reverse-engineering, and a few core system services don't even implement accessibility right.

All in all my opinion is that things have actually been improving even if extremely slowly, and having deep first-hand experience reverse-engineering the accessibility infrastructure, I can easily tell that most of these symptoms result from years and years of neglect and accumulated technical debt that is likely making developers at Apple weary of touching anything accessibility-related. The explosion of parallel processing resulting from the increase in the overall number of CPU cores exacerbates lingering multithreading problems, and the switch to ARM, which doesn't guarantee ordered memory visibility by default for performance reasons whereas x86 does for legacy reasons, may also contribute to the manifestation of stability problems in broken legacy multithreaded code, so nothing short of a full rewrite will contribute to any meaningful improvement.

I've been using macOS since 2014, first on an Intel-based machine and later with an M1 Pro. Bugs have appeared and been resolved over the years. I've been in the beta program, hence attentive to reporting bugs to Apple, especially with VoiceOver.

In my experience, there has not been an over-all decline. VoiceOver is more responsive for me under macOS 26, and I'm not experiencing serious bugs with 26.1. I use the Web extensively, email, text editing, the terminal, FaceTime, Zoom, Mona, Messages, sometimes Microsoft Teams, Music, Podcasts, and other applications.

For word processing, Pages is more accessible than Microsoft Word - probably Microsoft's issue at least as much as Apple's.

If you're encountering persistent bugs, I would suggest, first, making sure they are thoroughly documented and reported to Apple, with full steps to reproduce. If this isn't enough, take them up with an accessibility advocacy group that can negotiate with Apple more effectively than you can as an individual. For example, the National Federation of the Blind in the U.S. has a Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility. The European Accessibility Act also applies to consumer computers and operating systems. There may be avenues available in Europe as a result that an advocacy group could take up, if necessary. Discussing it here won't change anything unless someone takes action, such as writing high-quality bug reports for issues that haven't been adequately reported already, creating Apple support cases and having them escalated as appropriate, or contacting advocacy groups to discuss the concerns.

I can't do much myself, as I haven't noticed a decline, and I sometimes can't reproduce bugs reported on this forum - because the descriptions of bugs aren't detailed or precise enough to reproduce, or they're dependent on unobvious configuration settings different from mine, etc.

If you're encountering persistent bugs, I would suggest, first, making sure they are thoroughly documented and reported to Apple, with full steps to reproduce. If this isn't enough, take them up with an accessibility advocacy group that can negotiate with Apple more effectively than you can as an individual. For example, the National Federation of the Blind in the U.S. has a Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility. The European Accessibility Act also applies to consumer computers and operating systems. There may be avenues available in Europe as a result that an advocacy group could take up, if necessary. Discussing it here won't change anything unless someone takes action, such as writing high-quality bug reports for issues that haven't been adequately reported already, creating Apple support cases and having them escalated as appropriate, or contacting advocacy groups to discuss the concerns.

I've been enrolled individually into the developer program since 2011, 3 years before going blind, and have also been part of organization teams as a developer, and in my experience Apple has never really cared much about developer feedback unless it makes them look bad, so eventually I just realized that the whole reporting process was a waste of time and stopped reporting problems altogether. As a developer I've had multiple radar / feedback issues expire 5 years after reporting them, with automatic E-mails asking whether I was still experiencing the issues before they were automatically closed, long after I stopped caring about those reports at all because I ended up either avoiding, reimplementing, or working around broken features. As a disabled user I've had multiple responses from their accessibility team claiming inability to reproduce issues even with code and audio demos. Therefore no, until Apple's behavior changes, I won't do their own homework especially for free.

The simple fact that so many glaring accessibility problems remain on macOS should be enough to question whether they actually employ disabled people to report them internally. The platform is accessible but the experience of using it is far from remarkable or even enjoyable, it's just something that I now accept as part of being blind. Performing worse compared to Windows should be a real concern to everyone inside Apple because the bar is very low and even then Apple, a company with a legacy of outstanding user experience and attention to detail, still manages to underwhelm.

Since adopting macOS in 2023, I have found VoiceOver to be functionally sound. However, I am encountering significant challenges related to navigation consistency within the Mac interface.

The operating system's reliance on structures such as tables, groups, scroll areas, and toolbars results in a non-uniform user experience.

A key example is the discrepancy between the VoiceOver Utility and System Settings. Accessing options under the General category in the VoiceOver Utility requires the user to disengage from the table to navigate. Conversely, in System Settings' main General panel, using the Tab key after selection immediately breaks out of the table boundary to access subsequent options.

On the web, users lack a standardized or clear method to direct focus to the main content area upon page load. While navigation is efficient within the web interaction area, regaining focus after navigating outside of it is unreliable and confusing.

The primary concern is the absence of consistent navigation patterns across the native OS environment and web browsing."

It is the hardware side of things that keep me with the mac. Text editing, web browsing and the Finder are all far beyond what experience offered by NVDA seven or eight years ago.

I think the Mac with VoiceOver has a 'discoverability problem', in that the interface is not at all intuitive nonvisually.

Take, for example, the Music app. When I search for a song, if VoiceOver focus doesn't go somewhere else entirely or the system doesn't try to autocorrect/suggest my search into what it thinks I'm trying to look for (which almost always is inaccurate), I am presented with an element that just says 'Collection'. Fantastic! What the heck is that? Of course, I interact with that collection and there is a list of top results, songs, albums, etc. This is what I should be seeing in the first place. Go into that list of songs, find the song I want to play, and VO-Space (which used to work) to try and play that song. Instead, I am taken into what appears to be an album page. Only through an unnecessary amount of trial and error did I discover that for now at least, pressing Enter on a song plays it while the aforementioned VO-Shift-Space does who-knows-what. In these situations I do not know what VoiceOver is doing, and I don't know how I would know.

I would gladly file a feedback for issues like this, but I have no idea where to even start. "As a power user, I cannot figure out how this is supposed to work, and your accessibility implementation makes no sense" sounds great as an attention-getter, but it doesn't (at least, in my mind) lead to an actionable report.

These are just design choices that I am fine with personally. The issue is really when under the hood the design breaks in such a way that we have to really understand how screen readers work at least with gut feelings to be able to work around the real problems.
But somehow text edditing with gui is really the worst part of voiceover.

is the following
On any of the code editor / full ide you can think of, with the exception *maybe* of xcode, vb edit, cot editor, textMate, vsCode, pyCharm, androidStudio...
There is a horrible problem with indentation. Which makes writing python especially difficult.
So I understand that most editors whether they are on windows or mac use some tricks so that the indentation is not treated as regular character, IE 8 separate spaces. Rather, like with notepad++ on windows which is arguably the best gui editor I've ever tried, pressing home will either put the cursor on the actual beginning of the line so before even the indent, or at the code level beginning of the line, after the indent. On mac it's more or less the same story, except that there each indent level depending on the configuration of the editor is treated as a character, so you will for example hear 3 times space, or maybe nothing if I remember it correctly, as the cursor goes right or left, on a line with 12 spaces and the indentation level set to 4 spaces per indent.
The problem with Voiceover is that:
First, it may not read anything when on these special character sequences or whatever they are, but this is an non issue honestly.
Second, and the worst thing, is that voiceover, as we navigate left on those characters, will, very stupidely, announce the full content of line directly above the actual line the cursor is on, or, the line directly below it, if we navigate right.
And if we have the indentation enabled in VO settings, it will announce the indentation level of the line above or below it, which could be completely different than the actual line we are editing.
Fyi indentation announcement and white space are so badly coded that they overlap on each other, as logically white spaces is for all spaces but after the first character, where the setting for indentation apply, but we can make both overlap and create a very weird behaviour, thank you Apple.
So if any of you have understood just a single word of what I've written, first of all congratulations, you are way better than I am :) second, if you can provide any real solution other than using the rotor character word and line, which will break two decade of muscle memory and create all sort of other issues in vsCode for example, feel free to reply.
I have no skill to prove that but NSTextView seems to be the one thing at fault here as João Santos has mentioned too many times on this website now :)
I have been forced to learn emacs/emacspeak because of that, which has a lot of benefit at the cost of time and learning curve, as vim doesn't work for me at all.

Why is it whenever these threads come up, somebody's complaining about stuff from like twelve years ago?

Take one of the recent threads about whether or not LibreOffice is accessible on the Mac. Half the comments were like "no way, I tried it at least a year and a half ago, it was totally inaccessible"!

Here we have OP complaining about the Mac and Voiceover, and they're running an OS that's now four major versions out of date. They're also attributing these supposed issues to a machine architecture they've apparently never tried using themselves.

Why does this matter? Well, if we're going by forum reports, apparently the M series has really reduced the SNR bug, perhaps the thing most complained about on here.

But instead of mentioning that, OP is all, "hey I'm running a Mac that's four major OS versions out of date, where the only screen reader updates you get are when you update the OS, but why does everything suck so bad and it's just getting worse and worse and worse"?

I mean, yeah, there are real issues. We can argue over whether some of them are bugs, but they're there. As an example, I use Firefox as a browser, and if I want to select text, usually I just use VO-shift-c to copy what Voiceover read last, then edit out any extra stuff, e.g. if it says "link" at the end.

Does that take longer than Windows? Of course it does. Now, the question is, how often do I need to do that? How much is it impacting what I'm doing? That's something people can only answer for themselves, because different people are going to do that more or less than others. Also we're getting into tradeoffs, does the Mac let you do other things that are more important than having text selection on the web work just so?

I have no problem with somebody making a decision to use not a Mac because of that and other considerations. But what OP is doing would be like if I went into the Android forum here and said "why are you all using Android, I had a phone and it was so much less accessible than iOS"! Then we find out the phone I had was running Android 6, and I'm ignoring all kinds of changes since then.

I mean, I don't browse the web a ton on iPhone either, but I never managed it on Android, I can on iOS. But I also haven't tried anything newer than 6. Would it be fair if I just looked at people complaining about newer Android versions and said, "see, what did I tell you? It's terrible for accessibility, you can't get any work done, look at all of these complaints"!

I don't think it would be. But this isn't suggesting OP should go try a Mac. That's because I think, like most of us, OP believes what they believe. I'm not about convincing anybody that "no hey, I use it, the Mac is really awesome"! I dunno, it works for me. I can do what I need to do, same for Windows. Truth to tell, if Logic didn't work so well for me for music, I probably would have gone back to Windows out of habit. I don't think the Mac's doing all that much that's different for me as a user, practically speaking, I can just get stuff done on both systems.

I think there are a *ton* of reasons not to use a Mac. For one thing I don't know that there's much it can do that Windows can't. SO if you're comfortable with Windows, I'd say don't switch, if you don't have a reason to. Don't even worry about it, unless you're curious. It's just a computer. It's not magical. And IMO I'd be saying the same thing if this was about Windows, Windows has been really stable, at least for me, probably since version 8. But you see complaints about 11 all the time, even though, IMO, it really didn't change much from 10.

I'm more concerned with the way people are posting about it all. OP isn't just saying, "I personally don't use a Mac because X Y and Z and from what I hear, it hasn't gotten better in the last three years". OP is claiming, based on nothing more than a survey of people complaining, that it's getting worse and worse. But let's be real. If I followed the complaints on here, I'd never use anything Apple at all. The iPhone gets *way* more love than the Mac, but you don't have to look too hard to find the *exact* same complaints, Apple's ignoring Voiceover on the Phone, iOS is getting worse for accessibility, and so on.

But leaving that aside, we have proclamations about how awful the Mac is, and it's just getting worse, from, in many cases, (OP isn't the only one), people who haven't used one in years, practically speaking, or who have *never* used one but say things like "I'd never use one and wouldn't recommend it, go look at people complaining here"!

Reasonably speaking, I don't see how that's any kind of valid ... test? Comparison? Evaluation? I'm not sure what word I'm looking for but hopefully you get my point from the foregoing novel.

I first started to learn a screen reader with maybe Monterery with my Intel iMac. It was absolutely terrible back then, made much worse because I was learning a screen reader in the first place. So I don't buy that it was great on Intel and it's all the fault of Apple Silicon.

I think the code base is likely so big and complicated and not understood by anyone. Making changes is like playing whack-a-mole. You do one little thing here and a load of moles pop up in random places you weren't expecting.

The problem is that those on higheither don't understand this because they are so far removed from the actual users of the system, or they just ignore it because they want flashy new things.

And whilst it is great that they are adding things like Braille Access, they absolutely should not be introducing a single new thing to Voiceover without fixing the fundamental issues first. It is like Apple are more concerned about their image than their users. Another example is Activity context switching. No on e understands it, no one probably asked for it. It is probably a really nice idea but it broke basic things with activities and that is inexcusable.

I am really scared about upgrading to Tahoe. I feel like I lose either way.

Apple needs to get a grip of the QA.

wasn't it :)
... For me. I know more than most the systemic problems with mac. I still use it. Yes, because selling mine, which I don't want for whatever reason in the first place, will actually make me lose more money. It's just the state of things.
I am in college currently, in computer science, which is very very windows based, especially since microsoft are copying apple with visual studio not available on the mac anymore, nobody complains and everyone is yelling at XCode being a mac thing only, which it is, but unlike VS, it has always been. I have reported a fair amount of bug. It's really a prioritization problem. I had one horrible math content interaction bug which was basically preventing me to study on my mac before I discover the work around, which was rather anticlimactic. It got fixed in a matter of weeks, maybe a full month. Impressive. But this only happened once.
So.
It's bad.
Worse than other software, you can't deny that please.
But it's functional, when we know how to force itself to behave somehow as it should.
Ideal? Absolutely not. But there is only one company making macos hardware and macos software. That's it.
And. Please, audio centric workflow work better than other areas of mac for blind, which is not an excuse to say that these bugs don't exist or they are because of outdated version. This is completely false and almost an insult to every past, current or future bug report that is being sent.
PS: now before you guys create another war zone to justify be my eyes investment... 😂

All,

I understand this is a topic that people (myself included) have passionate opinions about, but... Please, no personal attacks on AppleVis. Questioning someone's intelligence is definitely over the line. Disagree. Debate the merrits of the arguments presented. But please, try not to be 'disagreeable'.

I could be wrong, but I think I remember starting to feel unhappy upgrading right around the time we transitioned to either Big Sur or Monterey, probably to Monterey. I seem to remember Big Sur being pretty stable and pretty reliable in Big Sur. Anyone disagree?

I usually wait until August before upgrading.

If you read my post, nowhere did I imply that Mac OS has no bugs. My whole contention is that OP is saying it's getting worse and worse, and all OP is basing this on are reports from other users. Meanwhile, OP also ignores reports of improvements, the biggest one being the oft-reported reduction of the SNR bug. Please note, reduction, not elimination.

Also, I literally pointed out a pretty big issue, text selection, agreed that it's an issue you have to work around, and then said it makes sense if somebody doesn't end up using a Mac for that and other issues. In fact, the reason I mentioned music is because it's the reason I switched and the reason I ended up staying.

But make no mistake, I could do music on Windows just fine. I don't think Logic is giving me anything other than a program I happen to get on with more easily. That's not nothing. It's kind of an accident that it happened that way though. But it's also really beside the point.

Because again, my whole point is that OP is proclaiming not *just* that Voiceover on Mac OS has long-standing bugs, true from everything I'm seeing here and something I've never denied, but that it's "getting worse" progressively, based *only* on selected reports of bugs by others. I don't think that's an objective way to evaluate anything. You can see from the Applevis blog posts that *some* bugs get fixed. It is also equally true that new bugs are introduced.

I think it would be equally problematic if somebody *actually* said something like, "Voiceover has no bugs, it works great for me and everybody should use a Mac". That's not just because no, not everybody should use a Mac, but it would just be untrue. I don't have to say that though because *nobody* has ever said that here.

I don't know what's so unreasonable about *any* of that, but that's my thinking on it all. I happen to disagree that things are "getting worse", and I disagree with the way OP seems to be arriving at that conclusion. I've tried to lay out my reasoning about that as best as I can, and to my knowledge, I haven't been insulting to anybody, if anybody feels I have, please contact me privately so I can apologize to you, because that's not my intention at all, and if that's the case, I need to work on how I'm communicating.

at least on my machine and all the configs of my friends that I've tried, all m4 or m4pros. So it's effectively not an option. I mean the real console vim and the macvim flavor.
Emacs at least does work fully (currently) with emacspeak.

Hi Brian,

No worries at all. I just wanted to get things back on track. Thank you for revising the post. 😊

https://github.com/pitermach/IndentBeeper

First, VO is pretty good now at announcing indentation level.
This solves what is now a non-issue.
But if you read my bug description, the problem is how vo announces the previous or next line instead of the current line or just the indentation characters when the cursor is in the indentation space just before the code.

I don't know why, but the standard voiceover feature for playing indentation beeps seemed a bit sluggish to me, so I stuck with hammerspoon. I understand the problem you're talking about, and I couldn't find a solution myself. I could be wrong, but using tabs for indentation should make your experience more consistent.

When indentation beeps first came to MacOs (Ventura I think), they were very, very slow. Apple remedied this in Sonoma. It does beep and speak at roughly the same time, though, so sometimes it is a little hard to hear. But it is much better.

The first signs of Mac-ness is doing the same thing over and over again and getting different results. Learning VoiceOver was the most unbelievably frustrating experience. Whether it was trying to enter text into a box that VoiceOver tells me I can, only it won't accept characters (e.g. search box on app store) or incomprehensible Collections, as Michael mentioned above, that are just not designed at all for us. I don't think I will ever get the hang of finding the Get button in the App Store. And because going forwards then back in VoiceOver often doesn't take you back to where you were, you need to completely start the horrible chore again if you accidentally find it but go too far. I will never really intuitively know when I am supposed to interact with something and use vo up+down, or whether it is tab/shift+tab and arrows. It always feels totally random to me.

Steven on Double Tap described using the Mac with VoiceOver as driving a car really, really fast over an ice rink. And I think that sums it up quite well - I never feel entirely in control using the Mac.

At the risk of mixing my metaphors, I think the shifting sands nature of the Mac is demonstrative of deep, underlying problems. Apple are constantly building more and more things on top of it without ever really addressing the fundamental issues.

I also think one problem is that VoiceOver almost feels like an entirely separate operating system overlaid on top of MacOs and it seems somewhat in conflict with the main OS. It would be better if the Mac was generally a better experience for keyboard users, and VO just added things on top of that.

VO is incredibly flexible and customisable and this is a great strength in that you can really use it in a number of ways. However, the big downside of this is that it also adds a lot of complexity and means that problems can be hard to pin down.

I think the answer to the question of whether it is getting worse, however, is that it is both getting better and getting worse. It is always a question of one step forwards, two steps back.

I just don't think Apple really understands VO properly. There are plenty of things that aren'y really documented. For example, many of us loved VO+J. Its help description made no sense but it was the Mac's F6. But I don't think anyone knew what it was supposed to do. SO when its behaviour changed and meant that it was practically useless for most of us, it was hard to describe it as a bug as such. Maybe it is now doing what it's help suggested, but it's not what we actually wanted.

What I really want is for Apple to get a proper handle on VoiceOver. Really understand what it does and how it works in practice. Get a proper automated test suite in place so it can be verified to be working.

Right now, every year we have these great big Mac releases that without fail introduce significant new bugs. It is never entirely safe for us to upgrade. The missing content bug in Tahoe is evidence of this. And we have no idea if this is understood by Apple - will they quickly fix it or do we just need to get used to this behaviour from now on.

When I could see I was always excited by new OS releases. Now they scare the life out of me.

I should also say I agree that VoiceOver is likely so full of hacks upon bodges upon fudges that it has become buried in technical debt. I also suspect that the only way we would ever get a truly great experience is with a rewrite

Actually the simplest thing for those fortunate of us who have a braille display would be to always use it when coding, as you can spatially know which indent level you're at without VO bugs when navigating with arrow keys. We shouldn't have to do that and it may be completely undoable for probably a bigger population of VIP I'd be comfortable admitting, but now I can truly code without wanting to smash my mac every 5 second.

It started, albeit gradually, with Lion, and became worse with Swift UI. Voiceover was a dream to use in SNow Leopard. Sure we couldn't read tables in text documents, the web was still a bit flash heavy so most video players were inaccessible, but on the whole it just worked. Coco apps with native, well-implemented interfaces were almost guaranteed to be accessible. When we got Lion which was a buggy, bloated mess that I don't think anyone remembers fondly. Then came the iOSification of the Mac, which has only spead up with Apple Silicon and Swift UI. Apps being ported across platforms without a thought to the fact that the user interface and key means of control on a Mac and an iPad are totally different. For us Voiceover users, that means messy, buggy UIs that don't work well if at all. Voiceover's web rendering is vastly outdated and unreliable on the modern web. I've been saying for years that we need a MacOS release that is what Snow Leopard was to Leopard. A bug fix release focused not on new features, but on refactoring code for performance, reliability and stability, stripping out support for unsupported platforms, getting rid of the features nobody uses, and generally polishing the system to give us the kind of performance we should expect from such powerful hardware. That would include a deep dive into Voiceover. And if Apple no-longer cares, which is becoming more and more evident, why don't they simply make it open source and let the community fix it? Set up a Github repo, let the community fix it, and allow people to either run the community build or the version bundled with macOS. that can be updated with the MacOS update cycle.

My source? Trust me bro :) but I am sure I am right on this one.

so my job is a translator, I translate from english to arabic, now there is a big, big problem.
so arabic is a right to left language, but apple decided to make this briliant idea where the cursor direction also follows that, if that was only it, it wouldn't be an issue, but.
1. If you have any english text, or even numbers, the direction mishmashes randomly and without any pattern what so ever.
2. The cursor direction changes but the shortcuts don't follow, which stays confusing for a while, for example, if cmd+left takes me to the beginning, it's supposed to be cmd+right now then right? Except... No, it isn't, but, sometimes it is?
3. Moving between words sometimes says, space, yes, comma pause included, then the word, very inefficient and annoying and slow.
4. The direction change also somehow decides to throw you over to the end of the line when you were in the beginning, which if you're moving character by character, lets you skip over some lines without realizing.
5. In many cases going to the beginning or end of the line reads the word instead of telling you the character, in the case of navigation character by character, which makes editing nearly impossible.
so yeah, editing text in english is cute, give me that and I'll do it every single day, editing arabic will probably let you throw your mac out of a window in 5 seconds.

@emperor limitless , and other. Sincerely, my rispects to you all. Is this a VO specific or VO just adds to the other problem that seem mainstream from what I understand?
This honestly seems terrifying and utterly disgusting / disrespectful from apple, though the simple sort of answer (not exclusable at all by any mean I mean) as much as we hate is is economical insentive.
But yeah, there is a reason, even if for bad original starting points, why windows is more robust, well was before windows 11 and copilot ai era, at edge cases.
No, I don't mean to start a mac vs windows debate here, pleaaase. But my point is windows 7 had punjabi as a language already, or was it for keyboard only? While Apple only had hindi for a long time, punjabi I think is still not supported as a system language? Or very recently. But I am sure that it's only now with 26 oses that VO has started early support for punjabi, which was quite unexpected and something I am very happy, so... Thank you apple! And I want to stress early support :).

Let me be scammed and brainwashed by apple marketting accessibility excellence and enjoy whatever I get still, please? It's my disabled right 😂 no seriously I'll properly try that soon and see if these focus issues are still problematic there.

Hi everyone!

I’d like to make a suggestion. Maybe I’m living in a dream world, but perhaps if we think together, we can actually achieve something. As I read through the comments, I can see arguments developing, but instead of continuing down that path, let’s try something completely different.

Before I share my idea, let me say a few words about myself:
I’m a 50-year-old completely blind person. I’ve been using a Mac since 2013. In the beginning, I still used Windows a little, but since mid-2014 it has been Mac only. I work as an iOS app developer, so whenever it comes to computer work, it’s always Mac for me.

Yes, I do experience problems. Things are definitely not perfect. Sometimes these issues are frustrating, but overall, I don’t feel they are so severe that I’d want to throw the machine out the window or anything like that.

My suggestion:
I know AppleVis collects bugs, and they are categorized by severity. We should review the Mac VoiceOver issues, perhaps test some of them across multiple system versions and different machines, and once we gather the ones that absolutely must be fixed, we could pass them directly to Apple.

We have Be My Eyes. Sarah Herrlinger (if I remember her name correctly) has appeared in podcasts many times. Would it be possible for us to have some kind of direct connection with Apple? Either with the accessibility engineering teams or anyone else who is competent in this area.

AppleVis is no longer a small or insignificant platform. I don’t think it would be impossible to build a closer collaboration with Apple. We could help them with testing, provide suggestions for improvements, and so on.

What do you think?

I've been a Mac user since 2015, and I have always had a relatively good experience with VoiceOver. I have seen some accessibility regressions that have made things like web access, editing text, and emailing quite annoying at times. I suppose everything really started with Big Sur for me, which is when they were doing that transition to make everything more compatible with each other. I can't for the life of me remember what they called it, but it was when they were updating all of the Mac apps to function similarly to iOS and iPadOS. While this was a huge step in the right direction from a UI perspective, I did notice that VoiceOver didn't always quite know what to do with the new interface, as it would periodically hang or go unresponsive. I notice this primarily in Messages and Text Edit (there's been some problems with reading character by character or word by word in that program for months now), and I can work around it, but it's still rather inconvenient at times.
The other thing too is web navigation. I don't know how or why they set it up like this, but I think it's insane that you have to do a bunch of finger acrobatics to locate the next heading, link, form element, etc. I know that single key quick navigation exists, but it's more of a pain to use than it's worth. It's very possible that I'm doing something wrong in this context, and maybe I'm just used to being able to arrow my way through a webpage on Windows, but I would argue that the experience on Mac should mirror that of Windows because it's what most users are used to doing, and it would definitely speed up productivity.
Finally, I understand that Pages is a fantastic word processor, but I don't think VoiceOver handles the editing of tables very well. It's much easier and faster for me to do this on Windows, because the table commands are universal across the OS in terms of navigation. This is not the case on Mac, and again, this is one area where I think universal navigation standards should be used to improve speed and productivity.
These are just my thoughts, and again, it's very possible that I'm doing things wrong here. It wouldn't surprise me if that were the case.

Hello,

You are absolutely right. I sold my MacBook Air 2012 in 2018, and at the time it was running macOS 10.14. I’ve now had the chance to temporarily borrow a MacBook Air with an M4 chip, and the battery life and performance are incredible. Unfortunately, that doesn’t extend to VoiceOver.

Keyboard navigation with VoiceOver feels significantly worse than it used to:

• When editing text fields on the web, VoiceOver will sometimes jump back and start reading from the top when I’m on the last line.
• As I arrow down line by line, it often reads only the portion of the line where the cursor lands instead of the full line. I’m not interested in hearing that the cursor is on a space; I just need to hear the entire line.
• I constantly get “Selection removed” announcements while typing, even though nothing is actually selected.
• VoiceOver keeps announcing “empty group” on a lot of websites, even though I’ve told it to ignore groups. I’m using DOM mode for web.
• On some sites, VoiceOver skips content, gets stuck, jumps around, or refuses to read certain elements at all. It feels out of sync with how standards-based, WCAG-compliant sites are structured.

Even in System Settings, VoiceOver sometimes gets stuck on buttons, scroll areas, or text elements on certain screens. I am running macOS 26.1.

I really don’t know what else to say. I used to love the Mac. I used it for college, writing, and music production. I still want to love it, because the performance and battery life are unlike anything else. It still blows my mind how fast it wakes up when you open the lid.

Part of me wants to buy one when I have to give this one back, because I want to report bugs and help things get better. I’m just not sure Apple is really listening when we send feedback through Feedback Assistant anymore. I remember when they would actually respond to bug reports, or close them once we confirmed a fix. At some point, that mostly stopped happening for me, unless they thought the bug was particularly interesting.

It makes me kind of sad, because it used to be a pretty damn good experience.

Are others seeing the same behavior on 26.1, or have I missed some critical setting?

I have purchased Mac before one year since one year. I am learning Mac due to lack of materials I mean the updated materials. This little tougher to understand and get into the Mac ecosystem. Being said that there are more bugs been reduced in the latest version of macOS, and we are all discussing about the macOS with VoiceOver, but beer or which is the right platform where we get our issues resolved. This is the only concerned I have.

You are on to something. If we all band together and submit the same requests at applevis report card time I think that will help.