Concerned about accessibility of recovery on M1 Macs.

By The Evil Chocolate Cookie, 19 November, 2020

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I've been doing some research on the new M1 Macs. While doing this, I found something that makes mee worry about accessibility. On an intel Mac, we could just press and hold command+r to get to recovery. Now, with the new M1 chip, this has changed. Now you have to hold in the power button until a startup menu appears, then click an options icon. Based on the accessibility, or lack thereof, in the intel startup manager, this concerns me. How will those of us who use VoiceOver fix our computers if we can't even get to recovery? I find this extremely concerning and thought I should share it here.

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Comments

By Dennis Westphal on Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - 20:20

Hi,

I have bought myself a MacBook Air with the M1 Chipp and had my run with it.

The good news is that this Recovery Menu works with VoiceOver. However entering the Option to format or change the drive will crash VoiceOver. So currently there is no way to format your system drive using system recovery.

Other things I have found will end up in another post here on Applevis Once I have typed them up.

By Jakob Rosin on Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - 20:20

VO crashing in Disc Utility of recovery mode is BigSur issue and is also present on intel based macs. So thats not the M1 fault, rather the issue of BigSur.

By Jakob Rosin on Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - 20:20

Also a trial and error in that dialog is possible. The procedure I worked with:

  1. Make VoiceOver crash by focusing on the list of volumes.
  2. Arrow up many times.
  3. Press tab. Focus moves to the toolbar and VoiceOver is now happy. It should start talking. If not, activate VO in the usual way.
  4. Interact with the toolbar (do not change the focus before, as focusing the volume list would crash VO again).
  5. Choose Delete / erase.
  6. In that dialog, the currently selected volume name is mentioned. If it's wrong, escape out of that dialog, and focus the volume list.
  7. After VO crashes, arrow down once more.
  8. Repeat steps 3 -7