What the heck is happening with vo-j shortcut?

Hey there,

We will need more explenation of what your issue? Please give more details so that we can proceed.

Thanks,
Ayub

Hi,

I'm not sure how far back it started, but VO + J has been broken for quite a few years now. I want to say as far back as Monterey, but who knows.
Sorry to hear that you are still having troubles with it, with Sequoia. 🫤

I found VO+J became totally useless with Sonoma and I haven't really used it since.

Have you tried using windows spots instead? I think it's VO with square brackets. Steven from Double Tap thinks that is the solution but I've not found them any better than VO+J in my experiments. But at least it has a back and forward equivalent.

Problem with VO+J is that it's so ambiguous what it should actually do that it's impossible to say if it breaks. I have a suspicion that it was only ever useful by accident. The description is "go to linked item". To me this feels like some kind of aria thing there you maybe say that this item is controlled y this other item or relates to it in some way. Whereas I've always thought of VO+J as more of a Mac equivalent of F6 in Windows - ie it jumps between the main sections of an interface.

I imagine us all sitting around a circle.

"Hi, I'm Paul. And let me tell you, I have tried and tried to give up using VO+J, and with every new MacOS release, well, I can't help myself, I keep going back, trying it again, hoping it has changed. But it only changes for the worse, and I end up feeling used and discarded."

I have given up on VO J. It is broken in most apps, including Music, Messages, System Settings, Mail. I believe it broke in Sonoma and has gotten worse in Sequoia. It's too bad because this was such a quick way to jump to related items quickly.
I will send Apple Accessibility a note on this but I won't hold my breath for solution soon.

It's just totally useless. Even in the one app (Spotify) where it does work OK I just never bother to use it any more. I contacted Apple about this when Sonoma came out and it went the same way as most other bug reports. But please do the same.

We desperately need a good, quick way to jump around the important parts of an app. I don't care if it's VO+J or windows spots or whatever.

As of Sequoia, if I'm in any list view, such as Finder's list of files or Mail's list of messages, VO+J does nothing but emit a thunk sound.

I can use VO+left and right bracket to jump around window spots. But this is not equivalent functionality. For one, it doesn't wrap, so I must possess foreknowledge of the window spot layout to know whether to use left or right bracket.

Another difference, using Finder as an example, is that VO+J would place focus on the most related sidebar item, such as Documents or Downloads. But moving between window spots takes me to the top level sidebar control, and when I interact, focus is on the first item rather than the related item.

There is no good solution here. I simply have to accept that this functionality is now gone.

For those of you dealing with VO+J, and seeking alternatives, might I direct you to the following thread?

My suggestion is to state this when the applevis report comes out. I would file it under things that need fixed. Give good use case examples why you need this functionality back. Where was it helpful? Why can't you use current options? The more that request a feature be fixed the better the chance it will happen.

I had another read through the link. So the main windows spots thing it talks about is the VO+square brackets short cuts I believe. These work in a similar way to VO+J. I've personally never had any luck finding a good use for them.

The thing that puts me off the manual hot spots is that I believe they are system-wide so you can't have one set of hotspots for one app and another for a different one. Unless you setup activities of course. But then activities are not without their problems. Plus I have always been a bit too lazy to do it.

Sonoma introduced a bug that meant manually switching activities was totally broken. Then later on they put a partial fix. Now manually switching activities works unless you are in an application that has an automatic activity defined. In that case, it switches until you do anything with VO or change focus in any way, then it goes back to the app's activity. But then when you go to a different app you will find it has switched activity there - ie it has changed the default activity.

I tend to have a few activities I use - for example in coding I usually like pings for indentation, but I can switch to something that speaks it once I start getting into a mess. (IE all the time). For all apps I have an activity that just slows the voice down and switches to Siri which helps me read something more complex. So I'm loathe to go all in with activities for these hot spots.

Maybe I am wrong about that - I am basing this off a hazy recollection of a Double Tap episode from a while ago I think.

We just need some way to quickly skip through the major parts of an app. So between the toolbar, sidebar (if open) and web content in Safari perhaps. Or between the mailboxes, messages list and message preview in Mail/messages. I am sure this if F6 in Windows.

I never have any idea at all where a windows spot is going to take me, but chances are it's not where I want to go.

I hope the report card is a little way off as it'll be hard to complete it without taking the Sequoia plunge.