Apple has today released macOS Sequoia 15.3, tvOS 18.3, and HomePod software 18.3 to the public.
As with iOS 18.3 and iPadOS 18.3, macOS Sequoia 15.3 includes changes to notification summaries on Apple Intelligence-capable Macs and various bug fixes. In addition, this update brings Genmoji, first introduced with the releases of iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2, to macOS.
Also like iOS 18.3 and iPadOS 18.3, it was previously reported that macOS Sequoia 15.3 enables Apple Intelligence automatically on supported Macs. It can be disabled if you wish after installation by going to System Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri, and toggling the "Apple Intelligence" switch off.
The only accessibility change we identified in our testing of this release is a new sound that VoiceOver plays when selecting text or using Writing tools. In addition, while it is not something we were able to test, community reports indicate that reliability of VoiceOver's "Go to linked item" command is improved.
If you notice any changes, improvements, or regressions in your use of these releases, please post a comment below with your findings.
Release notes
macOS Sequoia 15.3
This update introduces Genmoji, powered by Apple Intelligence, and also includes other enhancements, bug fixes, and security updates for your Mac.
- Genmoji creation in Messages and other apps
- Calculator repeats the last mathematical operation when you click the equals sign again
- Easily manage settings for notification summaries from the Lock Screen (Mac with Apple silicon)
- Updated style for summarized notifications better distinguishes them from other notifications by using italicized text as well as the glyph (Mac with Apple silicon)
- Notification summaries for News & Entertainment apps are temporarily unavailable, and users who opt-in will see them again when the feature becomes available (Mac with Apple silicon)
Some features may not be available for all regions, or on all Apple devices. For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please visit: https://support.apple.com/100100
tvOS 18.3
This update includes performance and stability improvements.
(Source: "About Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD software updates - Apple Support"
HomePod Software 18.3
Release notes for HomePod software 18.3 are not available at the time of posting.
How to update
To install macOS Sequoia 15.3, choose System Settings from the Apple menu, select General in the table, click Software Update in the scroll area, and click the Update Now button to begin the update process. If other updates are available, you can click "More info" to see details about them and select specific updates to install.
To install tvOS 18.3 on Apple TV 4K or Apple TV HD, go to the Settings channel, then look for the System section near the bottom. From here, look for Software Updates under Maintenance, then select Update Software and Download and Install. Wait for your Apple TV to download the update. Don't disconnect or unplug your Apple TV until the update completes.
By default, HomePod and HomePod mini automatically install new software updates, but you can manually check for updates in the Home app on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.
Comments
Text attributes announcement…
Text attributes announcement when set to speak or play tone in the verbosity rotor has been fixed, it's quite an important patch and on sequoia the iwork apps couldn't be in a better accessibility state they are now.
Assigning names to voices…
Assigning names to voices.
Improvements in setting voice parameters using the trackpad.
Chime when selecting text
Okay, I see this was mentioned in the post above. I missed it in the first read-through. So I'm editing this comment to make it more relevant.
Was there any explanation in the release notes about why this chime was added? It is definitely related to the "writing tools in action menu" announcement. Both go away when Apple Intelligence is disabled.
No. Seems that VO gets…
No. Seems that VO gets release note very rarely. At least we also have a sound when generation is complete so it's actually a small nice update. Agree with the thing being completely forced on us without way of disabling it though.
Weird Chrome behaviour
Bitbucket pull requests seem to have broken in Chrome after upgrading to 15.3. I can't say for sure that Chrome hasn't updated as well but this was working yesterday.
For example, sometimes I jump to the source, and I can go through each line but instead of telling me what the line is, I just hear "group". If I keep going I get "Show more lines above" which is normal for when you get to the end of a block of code.
But then other times it can read the code. But it is hallucinating.
For example, normally if I vo+right I might hear "hyphen" indicating a line has been deleted. I can then use vo+right to hear the line. But sometimes I get "hyphen" then vo+right gives me "hyphen", and then a third time. But if I go back it realises there is only one hyphen and works as it should.
Another time there was a line ending in "endif". I pressed VO+Right three times and heard "endif" each time. But going backwards, there was only one of them.
These problems don't happen in Safari.
This is incredibly frustrating. When I was on Sonoma, Chrome had become a much better browser than Safari but it seems to have degraded quite badly in Sequioa and this trend is continuing. It's unusable for pull requests now - having to go back to Safari.
Why is it so hard to get a good web browser on the Mac!!!! I thought we were almost there.
Well for me chrome on teams…
Well for me chrome on teams keep crashing since sequoia on two different partitions and after many reinstall.
Chrome, text focus, and VO+J
I reproduced weirdness while viewing source in Chrome. The most prominant issue I encountered was that VoiceOver was very selective about what it read. For example, I pressed down arrow, and VoiceOver announced, "event 333," and that was it, which was surprising because that didn't sound like HTML to me. Then I used right arrow on that line to read by character and found a ton of content that VoiceOver had previously failed to announce, things like "DIV," "HREF," and "IMG"..
Another issue is VoiceOver's failure to sync keyboard focus and VoiceOver focus, something I've previously encountered in the Mail client with the body of an incoming message. For example, while viewing source in Chrome, on a page that you know contains the word "footer" somewhere in the source, press VO+F and search for Footer. VoiceOver focus lands on that line, confirmed with VO+F3. But as you use up and down arrow to navigate, you've find that keyboard focus hasn't moved at all. Worse, if you try to bring the mouse pointer to VoiceOver focus with VO+Shift+F5 (with the intent to invoke a mouse click), that fails. Press VO+F5 to read what's under the mouse pointer, and you will see that it's somewhere else entirely.
So, basically, it seems like a ton of stuff broke with this release, and the normal things I use to work around the breakages have also begun to break.
On the upside, yes, it looks like VO+J was given a little love recently. Assuming you hide the toolbar in the Mail client, VO+J has returned to its pre-Sequoia behavior of jumping back and forth between mail messages and mailboxes. Just don't show the toolbar, or VoiceOver somehow begins to hallucinate that the toolbar is a related item. VO=J has also improved in Messages, causing VoiceOver focus to cycle between the list of conversations, the currently selected conversation, and the text entry field.
Re: VO+J
Oh I almost forgot about that change in my anger over Chrome.
In Safari, VO+J seems to jump between address bar, tab bar and then different regions in the web page. And Windows Spots seem to work the same way. That could be an improvement...
I then tried Chrome and the behaviour is weird. On the first page I tried, it seemed to just jump to the web page, so possibly useful when jumping from address bar to content perhaps. But then I opened another tab and navigated to this thread and... well it seemed to jump through regions until it got to the bottom then seemed to jump between the two pages I had opened. Except if I went to the other page, it was a button and wasn't taking me into the content. Clicking the button didn't seem to do anything and the other tab still had focus. And windows spots just did something else.
Oh well, I guess it's still better overall. It's odd that there is no VO+Shift+J to go backwards. I always think that maybe this shortcut was helpful by accident and that what we all use it for is not at all what it was designed for. I'm not even sure what a linked item is.
PyCharm/IntelliJ
I don't think I mentioned this before, but since Sequoia almost all the popup menus in PyCharm have broken. I can get to the first item, maybe the second. I can filter the items, but only get to the first item then. And then I just get stuck in that one item. So it's half-usable if I know exactly what I am looking for but in 99% of the time it is really, really annoying. Jetbrains have acknowledged it and found a related thing on their own, so I'm hopeful they can fix it. But I wish Apple were a little bit more responsible with the things they change. I get that the Microsoft approach to making absolutely everything backwards compatible forever has its drawbacks too, but Apple really are reckless.
Sequoia overall feels like one step forward, two steps back to me.
Selection sound
It looks like this is a replacement for "writing tools available" that kept being said before. SO if you only select one or two words you don't get the noise, but if you select a load then you do. And it isn't in third party apps like BBEdit or PyCharm. I guess it is a small improvement as you don't get it constantly saying "writing tools" any more but still seems a bit unnecessary.
The chime, and the WTA
Are you sure the chime replaces the WTA (writing tools announcement)? I get both, the chime and the verbal WTA. The amount of text you select is important. The selection has to be long enough for an AI to work with, a complete clause at the least.
There is a slight improvement with 15.3. The WTA used to interrupt the reading of the selection. Now, the selected text is fully announced before the chime and WTA. I don't particularly view this as good news. It's sort of like when "busy busy busy" was changed to "Safari not responding." That issue continued to exist for another three years until David Goodwin encouraged us all to email Tim Cook. I hope we don't have to resort to that with WTA, but fear we might.
For anyone who is low vision, I'm very curious to know if they get some kind of analogous visual activity every time they select text, such as a notification, or a pop up that appears and vanishes on its own, alerting them to the availability of writing tools in the action menu.
For me selection was never…
For me selection was never interrupted? Or I updated too fast to the beta of 15.3 to notice. Wait I just got why you were frustrated with AI then! Indeed we have doubled the user announcement but it's less disruptive.
Did I mention how I get an…
Did I mention how I get an ego boost each time my threads are quoted by the official professional applevis editorial team in their official blog posts? for their official bug reports? :)
Turning off the chime
The selection chime does not adhere to System Settings, Sounds, Play User Interface Sound Effects. It's VoiceOver-only, and VoiceOver only has a single global switch for sound effects in VO Utility. Turning it off there would be analogous to getting rid of WTA by muting speech.
Re: chime
Ah OK. If I have a long line of text and I select it word by word, after a while I get the chime. At this point if I stop, then I hear Writing Tools available. If I don't stop and select some more, then I just get the chime the one time and it doesn't speak.
Oddly enough, I copy/pasted the email notification with your reply into Text Edit to test it. At that point as I was selecting the text, I got no chimes and no writing tools announcements. Even when I deleted the text and started typing some rubbish in myself, I still didn't.
I then created a new document, and typed a test sentence and could reproduce it again. I then overwrote with Cmd+V and again it stopped.
I then opened another text edit document, and it wouldn't let me type at all. I could go up and down and got the "edge of document" plink but nothing I typed came out. I closed the document and started again, and back to normal.
Then when I started writing this reply (in Safari), I got a similar thing. My characters were being echoed back to me but VoiceOver was thinking that the text area was empty. I did Cmd+A, Cmd+X then Cmd+V and it put the text back and worked.
All this isn't filling me with a great deal of confidence in this release.
Sorry to hear that guys,…
Sorry to hear that guys, funny that despite my complaints for the past 1.5 years I now seem to have a somehow comfortable experience on mac :)
I mean we have lots of ui and focus bug but except those...
Writing Tools Available
I agree with Paul. This behavior should be customizable in VoiceOver Utility under the text or announcements sections of verbosity settings. I'm going to suggest this to Apple's Accessibility team, and I'll also CC Tim Cook. We finally managed to get Safari fixed, so this shouldn't be too much trouble. Let's have it in 15.4 or 15.5 at the absolute latest!
Mac
I think at the end of the Sonoma cycle, the MacOs experience was generally worse than on Ventura. However, the emergence of Chrome as a genuinely better alternative to Safari did make up for it.
Sequoia certainly isn't the car crash that Sonoma was at launch but it is undoubtedly a step backwards as far as I am concerned.
The writing tools thing doesn't bother me at all as I never come across it except when messing about after seeing Paul's comments. But the degradation in both Chrome and PyCharm has definitely given my productivity a hit.
The only place I can really report the Chrome issues would be to Atlassian but from past experience that's not going to yield anything useful. I guess I will just get back to bouncing between Safari and Chrome again.
I found other places in BitBucket where VoiceOver was reading the same sentence twice, so it wasn't just pull requests. Actually on iOS 18.2 I was having some issues where Safari was doing just that until I closed and reopened Safari. Sadly I only noticed that after I had already filled in the Apple Report Card.
Can't hide Finder toolbar
In Finder, I'm unable to hide the toolbar. I should be able to do this with View, Hide Toolbar. Or I could use the shortcut Command+Option+T. Neither work. I'm in list view, if that makes a difference.
Discovered this while testing VO+J behavior, which seems to cycle through about five different Finder elements. I was trying to reduce that by turning off the toolbar, but it seems to always be there. Either that, or VO+J is turning it back on.
Music app
The Music app still lacks the albums view that was removed in an early Sequoia release.
Can anyone explain what VO+J is doing in Music? For me, it seems to be stubbornly fixed in the search box. As an example, if I navigate through the sidebar to some playlist, then press VO+J, it doesn't jump into the grid view. It jumps to the search box instead, and once there, VO+J never leaves. The Music search box is like a VO+J black hole.
Minor issue closing finder
Don't seem to be able to close finder windows with command w anymore. Have to navigate to the close button instead.
What? I tried this and don't…
What? I tried this and don't experience what you've said. Sound horrible though.
Yeah, sounds terrible, but…
Yeah, sounds terrible, but haven't experienced it personally.
Re: Closing windows
For the person not able to use command plus W, have you tried turning off voiceover first? I only ask because I am wondering if you maybe have a script or something that is blocking the functionality of command plus W, when voiceover is active.