Hey,
So partly because of me testing Tahoe, and just because I noticed the experience even on the web is much smoother, I am back to the good old standard grouping behaviour of VoiceOver on Mac.
On the web, yes we have the same thing that incentivized me to switch from jaws to nvda, aka each landmark is viewed as a single html element as we brows, but I discovered that I didn't read or understand fully VoiceOver user guide about web browsing. My primary and most reliable way has always been vo and arrow keys, and vo cmd letters to navigate by elements. I've just got to get used to use vo shift left/right arrow keys when necessary, and now I no longer have any weird problem with teams in the chats or any other modern web app thanks to this, outside web notification centre is not broken this way on both sequoia and tahoe, I don't have to deal with weird horrible activity switching bugs just for most of 1st/3rd party apple apps like garageband, iwork suite, preview and etc...
In tahoe scrolling has been patched, and since I discovered how to bypass javascript copy blockign 2-3 days ago for my very specific use case, well, and with the patches brought by sequoia to text in iwork, and the potential improvements I'm already seeing with tahoe and spotlight in general, the mac hasn't never been that comfortable for me to use!
And thanks god that emacs and latex exist. Ironically the accessibility gaps of macos have actually forced me to properly learn most linux tools I was just overhearing about here and there, which is a good thing for everyone. And with Matt Campbell doing great stuff thanks to the EU with Newton project, linux desktop which means hopefully asahi linux as well, is suddenly becoming very interesting, and so is my mac.
And who knows, maybe one day things will be good enough for me to not only just have a minimum functional and accessible metal linux desktop, on my macbook but maybe a proper windows 11 virtualized in linux so even on my m2 pro I can run wsl and bypass the arbitrary software limitation of the nested virtualization capabilities only being exposed to >m3 chips while m2 is able to do it on the hardware side? I read somewhere that the team of asahi was actually able to do that.
Sorry for going off on a tangent :) Thanks to that probably one single nerd who will be reading and understanding that, and potentially for correcting me, because I am not that nerd (yet) to stop taking daily shower and have somewhat of a social life. Although I tried stormux --> archlinux so even that is questionable...
By TheBlindGuy07, 3 July, 2025
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
Talking to myself
The Prime Times is often used to say that it's genrally better to stick with the defaults of any software whenever possible. It's obviously not a rigid rule, but I have started to apply this to voiceover on mac with standard grouping behaviour and beside the incremental quality of life improvements on Tahoe with scrolling for example, I have noticed that I have infinitely few weird focus/ui bugs with voiceover, and even on the web the experience has never been more comfortable.
Re: vo-shift arrows.
What's the difference? Keyboard help says VO-arrow and shift-VO-arrow do the same thing, move right or left.
I generally try to stick to standard behaviors unless there's a good reason not to. At least this is something that's built into the system. But part of the reason I don't end up using things people love like Alfred or other alternative launchers, apart from the fact that I just haven't found a need, is that if I get super used to that, then I'm going to be lost if it's gone.
This happens whether you want it to or not. Whenever I upgrade the Mac now and start running a Windows VM for games, I am going to have to partially relearn NVDA, at least in terms of muscle memory for keys and stuff, even if I remember all the stuff I need. I've been using the Mac full time for less than a year. But I'm going to want to do caps lock shift-d to get to the desktop, not Win-m or win-d. Yeah I know, that's not NVDA, but you get my point.
About not using the standard grouping
What are some advantages of not using the standard grouping behavior? I’ve always used it that way, and now I’m trying to learn what I might be missing out on ☺️
Re: about not using the standard grouping
For those not used to VoiceOver's hierarchical navigation model, it may be helpful to change the grouping behavior so they don't have to interact with elements as often. For me, I am fairly well accustomed to this model, and when changing the grouping behavior, I've found that the overall accessibility experience on macOS is less predictable. Not using grouping behaviors other than standard often, however, I'm not always sure what's considered expected behavior versus what's a bug.