Apple releases macOS Sequoia 15.2, tvOS 18.2, and HomePod software 18.2

For macOS, TLDR: most bugs discussed so far are still there. From my 10 minutes quick testing after double reboot, in fact all bugs I mentioned on the rc releases plus other are still 100% there.

You'll find below the status of some of my feedbacks.

When navigating backward in the submenu items of a menu bar, the first item is selected when the boundary is reached with trackpad and vo-up arrow

FB16087184, dec11 2024, active, not acknowledged, no similar report as of dec11 2024 (obviously but keeping the template coherent) First, please note that this bug was initially discovered by me somewhere in the first versions of the macOS Sequoia 15.0 developer beta cycle, as far as I remember, or maybe on the 15.1 or 15.2. The bug happens when I navigate the menu bar. It will happen if I access the menu with either of these two ways: 2 finger double tap top on the trackpad or vo+m. The value of the 3 behaviors of VoiceOver with the mouse pointer found under Navigation in VO Utility don’t have any incidence on it either.

Example, I am in the Apple submenu in the menu bar. For clarity purposes, as of Sonoma, when voiceover’s Mouse pointer setting is set on Follows mouse cursor under Navigation in VO Utility, pressing vo+m (only, irrelevant for the trackpad gesture) will place the cursor in the first submenu, which is Apple. For context, if I then want to press f so the cursor is onto the File submenu, it will instead focus on Force quit, which is the only menu item in Apple submenu starting by the letter f. This is why my configuration is et on Ignores VoiceOver cursor so the previous behavior of Ventura where pressing f after vo+m will focus on the File submenu is preserved, a tip discovered by some applevis users. Also, arrow key quick nav does not affect the navigation in the menu bar in any way. Then, either with the trackpad swipe down gesture, the down arrow key or vo+down, I will hear “Apple menu About This Mac”. The incorrect behavior is the following: When I perform the 1 finger swipe up gesture on the trackpad or vo+up arrow key, the first item under focus, (in this case About This Mac, is pressed. Or, the New Window button in the File submenu while in Finder, for example. The correct behavior would be the sound of boundary reached playing when on the first item and the focus unable to move up further, and the first element not being clicked. The workaround is to use only the up and down arrow keys in the menu bar as they will wrap as usual going from first to last item and vice versa, in all submenus of the menu bar.

macOS Numbers and VoiceOver Audio Graph Issues

FB16040223, dec4 2024, (maybe partially solved more detail later), not acknowledged, no similar report as of dec11 2024 See details (eventually) in the corresponding thread.

Impossible to read math equations in iwork apps

FB15530138, oct18 2024, active, not acknowledged, no similar report as of dec11 2024 Slightly bad title, it should rather be impossible to navigate in math content in iwork apps using the same interaction model on the web, reports from users here says this was working awhile ago. Currently if you're on macos 14 or later you can try to read in braille (which I didn't) but this was already impossible as of Ventura and then we didn't have this possibility. TLDR? Impossible to navigate properly in a real long math equation in any of the iwork apps and get the spoken output in a more digestible form unless you copy last phrase and read it in textedit for example which is still bad as all the math will be translated in text, e.g. 2. x squared instead of 2x^2. Quite a bad impact on STEM students and people working with math stuff professionally. What happens instead is that you can't interact infinitely in the equation but with vo and arrows nothing happens unless the boundary reached sound.

Impossible to lower the volume with command+roter on trackpad

FB14922682, aug25 2024, active, not acknowledged, no similar report as of dec11 2024 TLDR: the trackpad gestures described in voiceover user guide to control the volume no longer work. All the other equivalent gestures and scripts for rate and pitch do work as usual.

When in a Finder Window, impossible to navigate in the desktop content with arrow keys after pressing vo-shift-d

FB15899517, nov20 2024, active, not acknowledged, no similar report as of dec11 2024 To trigger this bug, I must be on the desktop. I start with opening a folder or folder alias by moving to it with the arrow keys (all form of quick nav in VO utility off) with cmd-down arrow or cmd-o. Depending on VoiceOver verbosity and finder settings, for me it says something like this once I open the folder by one of the methods mentioned above. Cal I window column view browser 1 item selected. Cal I group With “Cal I” being the folder I just opened, in column view (cmd-3 in finder). Then I press vo-shift-d to go to the desktop, after having moved a little bit in the folder content, or not. Voiceover does not announce anything nor does any of the cursor actually moves to the desktop except for the mouse one (vo-fn-5). Then, with vo-fn-3 Describe item under the cursor, it says “nothing is in the VoiceOver cursor”. Vo-fn-5 would say “Desktop group is under the mouse”. Otherwise, if I press cmd-` (us layout keyboard) to move to the desktop after having opened a folder from the desktop as described above, it’s still possible for me to navigate the desktop normally.

Voiceover reads some of the previous output of the terminal when browsing commands with up-down arrows

FB15534558, oct18th 2024, active, not acknowledged, no similar report as of dec11 2024 TLDR: The title is self explanatory I think. Open terminal, do ls and pwd a couple of times, press up/down arrow to brows past commands and you'll hear portion of previous outputs visible on screen before the actual command the cursor is on. Workaround: clear screen or vo-w/l to only hear what's under the cursor.

After accessing the dock with vo+d or 2 fingers at the botum of the trackpad, pressing escape no longer focus the cursor back in the app

FB15839086, nov15 2024, active, acknowledged, <10 similar report as of dec14 2024 When I access the Dock with either the vo+d shortcut as per apple VoiceOver user guide or by double tapping at the bottom edge of the trackpad, in all previous releases, I was able to focus back in the previous context/application by pressing escape. For example if I had textedit opened, I could access the Dock as described above, and pressing escape would have had shifted the cursor back where it previously was, in this context textedit. This no longer works however, even with the two fingers scrub gesture on the trackpad. The only workaround is to press VO-escape.

Other bugs

Numbers still works as expected which is good news, mentioned by me in some other threads. The arrow key bug on applevis bug tracker is still there. Impossible to hear where the cursor is when trying to edit the file name in the location chooser in safari during download. I also think that the one with impossible to hear the selected folder/file in column view when downloading is still there.

I haven't done more testing yet but I am probably keeping my stable partition on 15.1.1 as chatgpt alone is not interesting enough for me to have more bugs, and though I don't use the dock at all personally there it's one less bug to psychologically deal with.

Congrats apple, using apple Music with voiceover is a complete mess now. This is a payed service, how can they mess it up so fascinatingly? You can not interact with any content when you are on an Apple Music tab, voiceover jumps back to heading at the top.

I was about to update my new Macbook Air but no way if the above post about the Music app is universal. I am pleased with how well it works with VO and I use it a lot. I'll be very interested to know if Apple Music is broken on the Mac for everyone. I was looking forward to trying Apple Intelligence but this is a deal breaker for me.

Also the appstore has some frustrating bug since ventura (for me). There are workarounds but it's not an excuse. The toolbar to select between mac and iOS/iPadOS apps is still difficult to access as well as the nested description in collections thing in an app sheet.

Text attributes Speak is still broken since 15.0 beta 1.

Hello everyone, I found that Safari is still not working properly after upgrading to 15.2. For example, if I want to click on the translation option on the page, the VO plus space function still does not work. I can only use mouse click commands to operate it. I saw someone reporting on AppleVis that this bug has been fixed in version 15.1.1, but that's not the case here.

Based on my quick tests, it also appears that not many things have been fixed.
The voice parameter adjustment from the touchpad does not work.
The quick switching of voices assigned to actions for the application does not work.
The notification center (VO+O) still does not work and the focus changes position on its own.
Additionally, the calendar has been broken. When adding an event, after moving the focus to the calendar name button, the entire program freezes.
In the Polish version of the system, punctuation in Finder or Safari's address is read in English.

Subject says it all. I plugged my Mac in on Thursday morning and attempted to update it, but no go. Then last night I plugged it in again and decided to leave it for the night. But I'm still on 15.1.1 . Has anyone else experienced this?

Update: Just checked before dinner and I've got 15.2 now. It must have done its thing successfully whilst I was upstairs visiting a neighbor. But anyway, I haven't noticed much yet. I see that the connection message is back though when pressing VO F7. I'm stoked to try out Apple Intelligence! I also saw the new app called Image Playground, and am rather curious about it.

FB15534558. Will give more details later but from a 5 minutes testing 2 days after the updates and as many reboots it seems to be gone!
It seems that for just small commands like ls and pwd it will still read some previous outputs, but the longer the result is the less likely it is to keep doing that. I don't know if it was already like that before or not on Sequoia though. TLDR, for real world productivity scenarios terminal with voiceover works quite well! Except for skipping random portion of output such as with llama where the problem is obvious but for longer outputs generally speaking you wanna read them slowly anyways. And ncursus interfaces work now (or I learned how to deal with them) so I can confidently say I don't need nor do I recommend tdsr which doesn't work in vim last time I tried it.

What do you mean that you can't adjust the voice parameter with the trackpad? For me ctrl and option + rotor clockwise and counterclockwise work well for pitch and rate it's jsut the volume with cmd rotor which doesn't work.
For the action thing are you talking about activity contexts and voice change? I confirm the notification center bug with vo+o (in other than standard grouping behaviour under Navigation, for me Announce groups).

I just upgraded and immediately jumped into the Music app to see if it was broken.

I can't see that the interface has degraded in any way. It's klunky, but it has been klunky for the past several major releases. If I contort myself and do all manner uf unnatural navigation manoeuvres, then I'm able to search for "The Cure", interact with the web content, click their latest album, browse the table of tracks, play previews, etc. In other words, it all seems to work exactly as it did in 15.1.

If anyone is experiencing some new broken behavior, let's hear specifically what is broken.

I'm using Finder in list view with VoiceOver enabled. At any given time, one item is selected, and if I press shift+down arrow, it adds the next item to the selection.

The only problem is that VoiceOver is not announcing the name of that second item. I hear VoiceOver announce: "Added to selection, two rows selected." That's all, no file or folder name. If I continue to shift+down arrow, the names of subsequent items are announced as I would exptect. It's only the name of that second item, the first one added to the multiple selection, that VoiceOver fails to announce.

If others experience this, let me know, and I'll open a feedback issue.

Hey Paul,

That is definitely odd. Does the VoiceOver speak selection function at least work as a workaround for this? I cannot remember the hot keys off of the top of my head, but I know there is one to have voice over speak whatever is currently selected/highlighted.

Hey Brian. Yes, if I press VO+F6, it reads both items. Unfortunately, that's not a practical workaround. With Finder in list view, announcing the current selection with VO+F6 announces each column header and each selection value for that column, separated by pauses, so I get the first file name, then the date modified header, then the date modified value, then the size header, then the size value, etc etc, for all enabled columns. Eventually it gets to the second selection and announces the name of that file or folder. And I don't really want to disable those columns. I mean, that's why we have list view, right?

Additional information about reproducing this issue:

To reproduce, VoiceOver must still be reading the columns of the first item at the time you press shift+down arrow. So, the steps to reproduce would be:
1. Press up or down arrow until you reach the first item you want to select.
2. While VoiceOver is still reading the column information for that file or folder, press shift+down arrow to select the second item. Notice that the second item file or folder name is not announced.

Another observation: Once I have two items selected, if I press shift+up arrow to deselect the second item, its name is announced correctly. And if I re-select it with shift+down arrow, it is also announced correctly. It only has a problem the first time it's added to the selection.

Paul,

So it sounds like the issue is more to do with voiceover not being interrupted, when you hold shift and press down arrow, then simply not reading the information in real time when needed. Do I have that right? If that is the case, the only thing I can think of to do, or rather to tell you to do, is once you arrow up to the first item you want to select, press control to stop VoiceOver from speaking, then hold shift and start pressing down arrow.
Until this is fixed, resolved, or worked around, this is the best you're probably going to get for now.

@Paul this is common, on the side bar in the vo user guide too vo sometimes cut itself betten the name of a section and the discloser thing area, expend/collapsed. Terminal too. VO=horrible at queuing elements.

According to the voiceover new tutorial (awesome thing!) I tried, it's not a bug but a feature now! Or maybe they intended to write vo-escape in the tutorial and the bug just happened now? So if their internal documentation says that it will be almost impossible for this bug to be fixed. But the scrub gesture doesn't work either it's specifically vo-escape. Seems like the same thing than the impossibility of navigating with arrow keys in the status menu reported to be possible awhile ago here but now isn't.
There was 0 survey about that. Why do they think it's a good idea is beyond me. Anyways.

Can we start a go fund for a Steve Jobs resurrection charity?

I sent the link of this thread to accessibility@apple with a brief message of the impact it has. Here's what they said to me today.
Hello,

Thank you for your email. We appreciate you taking the time to provide this feedback, and wanted to let you know that Apple is aware of this issue, and is currently investigating.

Sincerely,

Apple Accessibility

Case-ID: 10634955

I think this is related to the VO escape thing. Whenever I click finder in the dock, it doesn't move voiceover to the finder window, the focus just stays in the dock even though the finder window has opened. I have to now do VO escape to actually enter the window I just opened.

Yes. I reported that too. Also present on the 15.3 beta 1. It's in fact specific to finder.

I've been noticing in Mail that message summaries are being given as I advance to each message. These are nice and to the point, and they're spoken out by VoiceOver on my M1 MacBook Air. I still have the problem of not being able to automatically go to the next message once I delete something. But Apple Intelligence seems to work pretty well on my end thus far.

Control-F8 is supposed to move focus to the status menus, but it doesn't work. I suspect this joins the list of broken general purpose macOS keyboard shortcuts. I wouldn't classify these as VoiceOver issues, since anyone could technically use these system shortcuts. Time to report them and hope they get fixed in subsequent 15.3 betas.

Be cautious when updating your macbooks, for me my apple inteligence settings are the same on 15.1.1 and 15.2-->15.3 beta 1, and ever since the update to 15.2 and now on the next beta my battery life on that partition is absolutely horrible, and it's been the case since december 9, and since december 16 too, while on the exact same device on 15.1.1 which I'm still keeping just for battery I can get as crazy battery life because of arm as usual. It's been mentioned on Reddit too.

Apple Intelligence does, indeed, seem like it would be pretty cool. Too bad I can't use it on my brand new M4 Mac Mini.

Turning off Apple Intelligence is the only way to get rid of the "writing tools in action menu" announcement that spews out every time I select text. I opened an enhancement request in Feedback Assistant asking for that announcement to respect VO general verbosity or speech hints. I hope Apple implements my request. Until they do, I'll keep Apple Intelligence disabled.

With Apple Intelligence turned off, selecting text causes VoiceOver to announce the selection, which is how it has worked for literally years. One must wonder why one would want it to work any other way.

I found a new bug, this bug is limited to this specific version 15.2. For this reason, I also erased the entire Mac disk and reinstalled the system, but it did not solve the problem. The specific situation is that when there are no windows on the desktop, we press VO plus D and then navigate to the first Finder item. Normally, the focus of VoiceOver will enter this Finder window, and we can browse the sidebar or window The main part, but the current situation is that the VoiceOver finger will say "Finder has a new window" but there will not be any operable focus. Please note that in this case the Finder window is definitely open, because you can read the name of this window by double-clicking VO FN and F1. If we have opened other windows before opening the Finder window, such as opening a Safari window, then VoiceOver can work normally as expected. After clicking "Finder", the focus of VO can smoothly enter the Finder. I'm freaking out, wondering how many people like me have encountered this bug

Got a USB Flash Drive so I could install Sonoma on it in case of emergency but have finally taken the plunge.

I guess that new keyboard customisation thing makes some sort of sense, but it seems a lot more complicated than having separate commanders. I guess it's what you get used to and I guess this will make sense eventually.

But I think I may have found an actual bug fix!!!

In Sonoma and earlier, VoiceOver went totally nuts if you asked it to read a number in square brackets. That doesn't seem to be happening now.

By plunge, do you mean you have upgraded to Sequoia, with a backup of Sonoma on a thumb drive?

I've been on Sequoia since my m4 mac mini arrived, and I still haven't tinkered with the new keyboard shortcut system. Thank goodness all my old shortcuts still work.

Yes, thats what I was trying to say. Thank you for translating my gibberish.

Well I recently reported an issue elsewhere that meant VoiceOver would sometimes speak two left curly braces if indentation set to play tone and some weird specific line lengths.

Well, this also seems to be fixed.

@Paul - does this only happen in certain apps? I've not yet come across it so far, even though I have enabled Apple Intelligence. I have tried in Text Edit and Mail and they seem to work as I'd expect.

I mean this wtiam announcement is a bit bothering but it doesn't prevent me from actually selecting text at all and know what I've selected?

I recently purchased MacBook M1 from Amazon sales on November. Since the latest update some apps like OBS are not at all opening and working properly and sometimes spotlight search will also not open if I use command plus space Apple needs to fix this issue.

Reboot and double reboot. By not working you mean it just doesn't open/work like at all? Nothing even in the windows and force quit list? I don't experience this.

Ah that issue where it tells you that writing tools are available is dependent on how much text you select and which app you are using.

I can reproduce it in Text Edit and Mail, but only if I select a number of words. But not in Safari or non-Apple apps like BBEdit or PyCharm even though the option is there in the action menu..

I guess it's all part of the push to ram AI down our throats at every possible moment. I am quite cynical about some of these writing tools, although one of my work colleagues writes war and peace in every email, so I can see myself using the summarise option a bit.