Has anyone found a way to stop voiceover reading the box drawing characters in terminal? I've tried everything I can think of, including specifying them as punctuation to not be spoken and specifying them as pronunciations with no replacement value, but no luck. Anyone?
these are the characters I'm referring to: ╭────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
By Ashley, 23 October, 2025
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macOS and Mac Apps
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Custom punctuation
I had this problem too and I completely get your frustration. What I did, if I remember it correctly, is to go in the verbosity settings, add a custom punctuation (for me inherited from some) and for the two characters set them as Ignore in the 3 options dropdown.
Navigation in ncursus interfaces
VO is terrible at that by itself but we can manage if we know how.
These characters often appear inside TUIs, so I've found tricks.
Use vo-l to confirm the line item you're at. For words, use vo-w, and vo-c for characters. After arrow keys movements. For large lists such as when we configure locales it's a bit annoying, but at least it works.
Non-interactive mode
Text-based user interfaces expected to be executed from a shell prompt usually also provide a command-line interface or some kind of scriptability designed to automate the process in a non-interactive mode, so just read the help provided by the commands that normally display the aforementioned user interface and the non-interactive option should be there. Another option is to just set your `TERM` environment variable to `dumb`, indicating that your terminal looks more like an old school teletype whose caret only moves forward, which will result in the interface turning into a shell-like command-prompt instead if the utility is standards-compliant.