Apple Releases macOS Sonoma 14.4, watchOS 10.4, and tvOS 17.4

I cannot begin to describe how happy having QuickNav back makes me!

Not only is it back, but it has resolved many of the issues that Single Key navigation has had with web pages on Sonoma - I can once again QuickNav through links in tables, not have single key navigation unable to move back out of tables, and so on.

This is a good day. Thank you Apple!

At last, The Accessibility Company™ have released an update to the stable version of macOS that fixes the regression introduced with the Sonoma release which caused Fusion to crash whenever VoiceOver was on. If you've been holding on to Ventura just for that reason, or waiting for a fixed build that runs on your shiny new hardware, you should seriously consider upgrading. Overall it's a nicer release, and with VMs working, you can now again use other operating systems. I am very pleased, although it's a great shame that it took as long as it did to get this fixed.

I will indeed be upgrading now. Thanks for the confirmation!

The behaviour of VO+X has now changed. It appears to now change the default activity. So if I am in an app like Safari or Skype that uses the VO defaults, then it does now stick to the activity I chose in VO+X, even if I switch between apps.

If I then go to PyCharm, it switches to my Coding activity as it should do. If I then switch back to Safari it reverts back to the new activity I manually switched to before.

If I am in PyCharm and switch activity, this works until I do something to change focus (e.g. use a menu). So within an app that is set to automatically switch the Sonoma bug is still there.

However, if I switch activity in PyCharm and then switch to Safari then Safari will get whatever activity I chose in PyCharm even if it had since reverted.

So although this isn't quite perfect, it is still a lot better than it was in the original Sonoma. Possibly Ventura behaviour was still better and no doubt Apple now think this problem is fixed. But a step forward all the same.

I hardly dare say this but..... this is maybe fixed...???

Only had a little play so far but it is definitely better.

Well that was a big and very pleasant surprise!!

In Ventura, if I used VO+M to get to a menu I could then type the letters of the menu I wanted to go to. For example, in Safari I press VO+, hear Apple then press B and it goes to Bookmarks.

In Sonoma this only worked sometimes. It would often get stuck in the Apple menu, so I'd need to repeat the process a few times for it to work. Although sometimes it was fine.

Well now it appears to have the broken behaviour all the time. If I am using Safari and hit VO+M then type B it says "Force Quit". If I press H instead it says "Lock screen". It does this in all apps. So it looks like you can only navigate by letters within the Apple menu itself. If you get to another menu and expand it, then it does work navigating within that particular menu.

This is a really, really annoying change.

Can anyone else confirm if they are seeing this?

I can also confirm they haven't fixed the problem with navigating by headings with children - it still just speaks the number of items and not the text. And if I use the rotor to navigate by heading it still reads out the heading level then has a good old pause before the name of the heading.

Also the Siri voice is unusable as it still is unable to properly speak letters if spelling something out. It slurs its words like it's been on the brandy. This has been the case since the first Sonoma I think.

So two steps forward, one step back. I guess that's still an improvement overall but the menu thing is going to annoy me all the time.

OK maybe more than one step back.

In Terminal, if I press tab to autocomplete in previous versions Sonoma would speak the bit that it completed. This now seems to happen only occasionally, which made me think on a number of occasions that it wasn't working.

And this is a bit niche I know, but in PyCharm I use Control+R to run my unit tests and have it configured to speak the results with VoiceOver. This has always worked great, but since upgrading to this new version of Sonoma it sometimes doesn't speak anything. This wasn't the case this morning when I was on the old version. I've not upgraded PyCharm so looks like another VO regression.

I'll have to keep playing to see if I can rationalise this in case it's something I'm doing but both things have been catching me out and slowing me down.

I can't reproduce the menu navigation issue under 14.4. In Safari, for instance, VO-M followed by B goes straight to Bookmarks.

As of Sonoma 14.4, when I attempt to activate the "Update all" button on the Updates tab of the App Store, it moves VoiceOver focus out of the toolbar but doesn't activate the button. The button isn't dimmed when I re-interact with the toolbar and locate it, and when I check each available update individually, the update button is still there and none of them are downloading. I have to update each app individuallly, which is irritating. Anyone else able to reproduce this?

All issues I have noticed to some degree, although of course it's been difficult to determine whether they're specific to my installation or not. For menus, even without the first-letter navigation, the way they're announced has changed, resulting in delays when moving across the menu bar because of the sound introducing the new popup menus. In Terminal, it does indeed not announce the autocompleted text and I have to check, although I thought this might be an issue specific to zsh; I must try bash. And yes indeed, pressing the updates all button drops you elsewhere; if you want to use that button, you must now locate it using the Tab key and cursor keys, and then press the space bar. So all in all, very unfortunate little regressions for what is otherwise a fairly good lick of polish. Please keep reporting them to Apple.

Bash also has the same problem as zsh. I hadn't thought to try that but sadly it is no better.

But this update has at least restored a tiny bit of faith in Apple that they might actually address some problems eventually. But for a company of their size and reputation their quality control is absolutely terrible.

Thanks to the two comments above for commenting about the menus. I wonder if there is a secret option that fixes them. If I get some free time I'll try resetting to defaults and see if I can find it.

I sent both of these issues to the accessibility email.

Since 14.4, I've observed that on some web pages, when pressing VO-Left or Right arrow quickly in order to navigate around the page's content, navigation is only possible with much delay. Very annoying.

I haven't noticed any changes to menu bar behavior. Is there supposed to be a new sound or change to how menus are announced?

Hi everyone. I just updated yesterday, but didn't have much time to play around. So earlier today I noticed something with deleting messages when using the native mail client on the Mac. I thought this might've been specific to just 1 or 2 voices, but it appears to be happening with all of them. I've not yet done anything in Braille with this update. But it seems that upon deleting a message, VO does not automatically announce the next message. Is this happening to anyone else? I realize it's a minor thing, but just curious.

There is a little squelchy noise it makes when moving from one menu item to the other. I don't particularly remember it doing that before. It seems a bit unnecessary.

I opened up DuckDuckGo just now, went to the menu and hit B and it went to bookmarks. So I tried in Safari and it still doesn't work, now it doesn't in DDG either so I guess it was a fluke. Guess I am goin gto have to try to learn a whole load more keyboard shortcuts.

Ah I think the issue with the menus is that when you press VO+M it is actually opening up the Apple menu, and the little noise it makes is signifying that the menu is open. So if, for example, I press S it will go to System Settings not Safari. If I move up it jumps to the bottom of the menu. If I move across to a different menu then pressing letters selects things from that menu.

Oddly enough I had suggested in a previous release that I couldn't go up to jump to the bottom of a ,menu and mistakenly remembered that I could before. So this is sort-of fixed but the end result is worse.

I wonder if there is a shortcut to collapse the menu?

This feels like it might have been done on purpose - maybe someone thought that there was no point having the menus collapsed, but it is much worse for those of us used to using letters to jump around. In PyCharm, for example, VO+M, G, F to fetch or B for branches or P for pull/push. OK maybe I was too lazy to remember the shortcuts, or create ones if they are missing, but it worked quite well.

I've not had a working pair of eyes confirm if my suspicion is correct so I could be wrong.

No sooner did I post that but I thought I'd dig around in VO settings. Turns out I have it set under Navigation so that the mouse pointer following the VO cursor. This is because I was dragging and dropping in Spotify and I think the end result of that is that it switches this setting. If I turn this off, then the problem goes away.

I have found that if I press VO+M it says Apple, then B for bookmarks and I get Apple again. Then B and it jumps to Bookmarks.

So looks like the behaviour is that the menu expands under the mouse pointer which I think is new.

I'm curious. At this stage of the cycle, do people think it's now worthwhile upgrading from Ventura?
Not only safe to do so in terms of bugs and stability, but actually beneficial to do so?
On iOS, I'm always at the bleeding edge, even running betas on my primary device, but on Mac I've remained more hesitant.
Cheers,
Dave

Dave, I've learned the hard way that upgrading causes problems that just aren't worth any kind of shiny new bells or whistles, problems such as losing my ability to use my most used app for 10 months, or going nuts trying to cope with focus jumping away over and over and over and over, and safari not responding, or any number of other problems.

August would be my earliest date for an upgrade since, historically, most bugs have been fixed by then. In recent years, however, Apple neglects to fix or is simply unable to fix bugs they've created, and those bugs persist for years, some even to this day, which you already know because you've been following applevis posts.

So? I'm not up[grading. I far prefer the old adage -- if it works, don't fix it.

I normally upgrade as soon as the newest macos version comes out, but in this case I held off do to the vmware fusion bug, but now that its fixed, I took the plunge. Also, the bug in ventura, where each time you launched vmware fusion and the, login items, vmware has added items that can run in the background, you can manage this in system settings, is gone, from what I can tell, thank god. Getting that notification every time I launched vmware was, annoying as hell.

Regarding mouse pointer getting changed to follow VO focus. Mr Grieves thinks Spotify might change this setting. That's a step forward. I've had it happen multiple times with no rhyme nor reason. I'd love to see this problem investigated and resolved. I know of no other VoiceOver setting that changes by itself.

I'm strongly considering upgrading from ventura to Sonoma. I've got a few weeks of available time to absorbe the changes, record videos, capture sysdiagnose archives, etc.

Just to clarify, I don't think Spotify is changing any VO settings - I'm not sure it could do that.
But in Spotify I will drag and drop playlists around, and to do this I move the mouse pointer to the VO cursor with VO+Cmd+F5 then do a mouse down with VO+Cmd+Shift+Space and then again to drop. I'm only suggesting this might be doing it because otherwise I tend to just ignore the mouse pointer altogether. But it's possible I am doing something else.

Regarding upgrading - I would say no because Sonoma is still much worse than Ventura unless there is something you specifically want fro the update. The only things I like about Sonoma are the web apps and the way the indentation tones are played over the top of the speech as it makes it much quicker to hear the level (although slightly less easy to hear as you now have 2 sounds playing at once).

I know some people like the changes to single key nav, but I gave up on quick nav a while ago as it was too annoying and now I use the num pad commander which is brilliant. But I guess if you are used to Windows single key nav might be good.

Other than that? I think there were some Eloquence tweaks if you use it. And there's a new but possibly useless update to activity switching by context.

But nothing worth putting up with the new bugs in my opinion.

Mr Grieves, nailed it. I usually like to have the mouse pointer follow VoiceOver cursor because it means I can explore expanding menus, and activate their items, without the bother of having to navigate to menu sections first, especially handy on the web. It's a convenience afforded to visual users of the mouse, after all, so why not us? But if it's going to give us all this trouble then maybe I shouldn't do that. That having been said I could get used to the new way of doing things ...

Concerning updates, well it was my own damned fault for not checking VMWare Fusion compatibility, however in my defence I do use AirPods Pro and the changes introduced in Sonoma for users of those is so astronomical that going back would have been unthinkable. And that's ultimately how they get you, of course. Naturally the other tweaks are nice too, like the Eloquence changes, but sure—ultimately, it's not actually necessary. It just means you're a very bad person for not upgrading when the good Mr Apple tells you to, that's all. Especially since the security fixes they make available are only partially backported. But that's never been much of an issue on my server machine, so ...

Thanks for the clarification on Spotify and drag and drop. I guess the cause of the mouse pointer behavior change will remain a mystery.

I pretty much have to upgrade. Ever since I tried 14.1 months ago, then backed out to Ventura, Music won't recognize my library and consequently I can't sync music to my iPhone. This is a bug, in my opinion. Backing out to ventura should not have left me with a Sonoma-only music library.

And, as it turns out, for the first time in months, I actually have several free days to perform this upgrade. It's why I also recently purchased Microsoft 365. I finally have time to do some upgrades and maintenance that I've been putting off due to other obligations. It's now or never.

I recall earlier versions of Sonoma changed how VO+J behaved in the native Mail client by adding the Favorites bar in the VO+J item cycle. Am I hallucinating or is the Ventura behavior restores in 14.4? Because VO+J is no longer visiting the Mail client Favorites bar, as near as I can tell. If they backed out that change, I'm thrilled. It added no benefit and totally fouled my muscle memory.

There has been a long-standing MacOS bug that effectively made it impossible for your Mac to know its location unless it was connected to wifi. With a Mac wired to the network, it had no idea where it was, and SIRI couldn't answer questions about your local weather or drive time. This is now fixed in 14.4. I can go into location services, check the checkbox for SIRI and dictation, and voila, suddenly SIRI knows where it is. It's reassuring to see progress on these truly ancient bugs.

Recently I had the opportunity to speak with a professional Sound Engineer. This individual is fully sighted, and designs sound effects for software (Apps, etc).

We were discussing our likes/dislikes with the current state of macOS. He says that he prefers Ventura or earlier versions of macOS over Sonoma because, according to him, Sonoma has an issue with sound degradation.

Moral of the story; the blind are not the only people frustrated with macOS these days.

HTH.

Seems like, about 9 times out of 10, if I type a query into the Safari address bar (using Google as search engine), then try to navigate the results by heading, I discover that my focus is at the very bottom of the page. To workaround, I open the headings web rotor with VO+U and press VO+Home to jump to the first heading. Anyone else experiencing this?

Another update on the new menu problem. I think it is just speaking the wrong thing. So if I am in Safari and go VO+M then B it says "Apple" but if I press down it opens the bookmarks menu. Occasionally it speaks the right thing. Oddly it seems to work as normal in PyCharm.

A couple of other things I have noticed that I need to spend some more time with.

PyCharm has an issue where if you open a file it won't always let you read it by going up and down lines. Instead it speaks just the word or character the cursor is in making it incredibly hard to read the code. I could get around this by using Cmd+1 to put focus in the project pane then esc to put focus back in the editor. This fix doesn't seem to be working since 14.4 and now I have to restart VO. I presume this is a VO thing not a PyCharm thing as it was working fine the other day.

Other thing I noticed trying to add this comment in - I typed in the subject but then wanted to go through it to check for typos, but I couldn't seem to get the cursor into the text box - it wouldn't read anything when moving left and right. I ended up deleting it and writing it again. This could just be a one-off and unrelated so will monitor. But I can't check it now still.

This does seem to be a new one for me. So type into the subject in an APplevis comment and then try to use arrow left and right to move by character. VO either reads the whole subject or just the last letter and that's it.

I quit Safari and reopened and it preserved my subject and at that point I could navigate it, but as soon as I changed it, it was broken again.

Anyone else?

I am really staggered how hard it is to write comments on APplevis considering how simple this site is. (I don't mean that as a criticism of Applevis by the way, quite the opposite)

The key thing to appreciate here is that the keyboard commands are in fact working, it's just VoiceOver not announcing the character you're passing over.

Which, yes, is an appalling bug.

For now, simply interact with the field with VO and use VO-Shift-left and VO-Shift-right to position the cursor, then type or delete as necessary.

Concerning menus. If I turn off mouse tracking of the VO cursor, go to the menu bar, then press VO-Command-F5, the menu opens. So clearly moving the mouse pointer over the menu bar has new behaviour. According to ChatGPT this is not normal, but then since when has ChatGPT been right about anything? :D

You can't delete characters in the subject line, and this has been happening for awhile, you go by form control, it's right to the "save" button. So it bypasses the subject and comment fields entirely. Plus, a minor annoyance, please let Alex say the capital D correctly? Sounds like he's saying T and it's just dumb. :)

Text fields that don't show up as form fields have been around for a long time. I named them "Covert Text Fields" in my blog from a year ago. Commonly encountered with login and password fields on many websites. Also, any website that takes your credit card information, it's a safe bet that the fields for data entry will be non-standard, not show up as text fields, and fail to work with VoiceOver.

I also see the problem with arrowing through the subject field when creating this AppleVis comment. The text cursor is definitely moving though--if you hold down shift and arrow through the text, VO+F6 will announce your selection.

The problem is similar to one that I've been seeing in Scrivener for some time, including Ventura. Normally I can arrow through the text and VoiceOver announces it as expected. But if I then select some text and Command+K to add a website link, then click okay and return to editing, VoiceOver fails to announce text as I arrow through it. I've found that Command+Tab to some other app, then back to Scrivener, restores normal functionality.

But that's not the case with the AppleVis comment box. It simply won't read characters as I arrow over them, no way, no how.

Thanks, I never knew about VO+Shift+left/right when interacting. That does seem to work but I do find it depressing how hard it is for Apple to get this right. It's like trying to plug holes in a bucket with your fingers - they pull one finger out to plug one hole and then water starts shooting out the other one.

I've had a bit of a long-standing problem which I notice in PyCharm but I'm sure I've seen it elsewhere, when VO will randomly jump words with left and right arrows instead of characters. So I end up having to use Option+left/right and sometimes hold down shift and basically just shake my fist and swear at it before it will move properly. It's incredible how much the Mac fights against what I want to do with it. Think this is one of the reasons I am so exhausted at the end of the day.

I was almost extremely happy that Apple have fixed my number one Sonoma bug, but as usual they give with one hand and take away with the other. And so we're still at the point where Sonoma is way behind even Ventura which in itself was a buggy mess.

Just when I think I'm beginning to learn all the VO shortcuts, that's two in a row that are new to e. Now if my stupid brain can just somehow retain them they will be useful!

I also checked VO help and there doesn't seem to be a shortcut assigned to changing the mouse vs VO cursor behaviour so not sure what is doing it. If I have time I will mess about a bit more and see if I can figure out a sequence that causes it.

I'm probably one of the few oddballs who prefers to do my little bit of Facebook interaction using the Facebook website on Safari. And now that I'm on 14.4, I notice that the comment box on Facebook has the same behavior as the subject line box here on AppleVis.

I was wondering how best to raise it with Apple given that they would have to login to Applevis to do it. Knowing about Facebook is useful, but I thought I would try and use the search box on apple's own web site and it does it there too, so that's a result. Will get emailing.

Would the cursor Tracking toggle help with this issue (VO plus shift plus F3)?

I a thinking it might be helpful for us to get together some very simple html pages we can use as reference. So some pages just with simple form controls or page layouts that are worth checking against. And then soe pages that demonstrate specific bugs. I created a couple recently to demonstrate the headings bug and the client-side filtering in tables bug but I never did anything with them once I had emailed to Apple.

Not sure the best place to do this. Would github work? Can you see rendered htl easily enough that way?

I really want to get the applevis comments bug into a simple html file I can point apple at. I know I could do this anyway but it might be good to have something we can all refer to (and possibly contribute to)

In addition to the above mentioned for terminal, I seem to be finding that it isn't reading the results of commands as often as it used to.

For example, if I type "ls" and get a list of files, I would want it to read out the list of files. Before 14.4 it would do it most of the time but definitely not always. Now it is more likely to just go quiet and not say anything than it is to speak the results. But of course it does it sometimes!

If I open up a new terminal and type ls I get nothing. If I press enter a load of times to cause it to scroll and type ls again it might then read the files. But I'm sure I've had some instances where I've scrolled and not got anything. So now I am compelled to move VO cursor to Shell, then interact then move up and down to find what has happened.

The terminal was never reliable enough to be called a good experience but it did annoy me less than most other things. Now it definitely seems more broken.

Wish Apple could just do some regression testing. Maybe they could ask ChatGPT to take a look a ttheir crappy codebase?

I generally don't use VoiceOver with terminal, but I just gave it a try. If I enter a shell command such as ls, VoiceOver seems to read the entire window starting at the top rather than just the ls command output. Yes, I'm interacting with the Terminal window. I'm using zsh if that makes a difference..

There's a VO+J change here that seems incorrect. If focus is on a sidebar item such as Documents or Downloads, and then you press VO+J (go to linked item), focus moves to the search button. I'm having a difficult time understanding how the search button is, in any way, linked to any item in the sidebar. I would expect VO+J to jump to the list of files.

Also, there's an issue with up and down arrow keys when Finder is set to list view. If you press VO+J enough times so that focus does eventually move into the list of files, up and down arrow fail to move through the list. As a workaround, Command+Tab to some other app and back again, then up and down arrow work as expected.

I can’t figure out how to close apps in the new watch update. Does anyone else know how to do it?

If I double press the crown I get to the dock and I can swipe up and down to get Remove which I think closes the app?

On the subject of the watch, the new update finally seems to have fixed the Now Playing problem, whereby if I use y phone then airplay to a speaker and then start a podcast the watch wouldn't pick up on it. It now seems to work as per WatchOS 9.

I've seen the facebook thing for probably a year or so. Plus let's add that you write words that it thinks you want to mention someone. No, I can use the @ sign as it used to be. I also usually do my interactions on Safari. Trying for a bit more sleep, stupid DST.

The main thing I noticed after updating to 14.4 is this irritating bug with the dramatic decrease in VoiceOver’’’s overall speed and performance. You can especially find it on large web pages, such as long Wikipedia articles. Here the navigation becomes a real torture.

On 14.3, there were no problems like that.

Has anyone found a workaround? Maybe it’s something with a new but yet unexplored VoiceOver setting? Just like this disastrous mouse cursor issue.

This looks quite useful - it seems to work in text editors, but also in Finder, Spotify etc. Quite often the Mac lies about what the selected item is so I can see this being very handy.

However, does it not work in Safari? I was trying to select some text using caret browsing and VO+F6 tells me that nothing is selected, but if I press Cmd+C and paste elsewhere then it turns out it is selected after all.

I'm guessing this is nothing to do with Sonoma 14.4.

Sorry I was a bit too hasty with that last comment. VO+F6 does work in Safari but as per everything else on the Mac, not always.

I think maybe it gets confused if you have a blank line before the text you have selected. But it does work if it's just the text that is selected.

I presume this is just one of those bugs that's been around for ages. Apologies for going off on another tangent.

Prior to Sonoma on my Macbook Pro I'd find the login screen quite awkward to interact with, and soetimes a bit of a struggle to get VoiceOver running properly. It got fixed in one of the Sonoma updates although it was still pretty clumsy and did have a tendency to get a bit stuck. Probably not helped by using a bluetooth keyboard.

In 14.4 it seems to have regressed a little. I often start up and get no feedback, then sometimes after a bit I move around to hear bonk bonk bonk. Then have to do a bit of a turn VO on and off dance a few times. Someties it ignores me, sometimes it does it. And usually after a fight with it, I go into settings and find that voiceover has become unticked from the login screen again.

Anyone else finding this?

This has been going on since Ventura, possibly even as far back as Monterey. You could try one of the following:

Sync Keyboard and Mouse to VO cursor:

• Keyboard: VO + Command + F4; will move Keyboard to the VO cursor.

• Mouse: VO + Command + F5; will move your mouse to the VO cursor.

Sometimes this will help you get into the password field at the Login screen.

Alternatively. . .

Sync VO cursor to Keyboard and Mouse

• Keyboard: Shift + VO + F4; will move the VO cursor to the keyboard focus.

• Mouse: Shift + VO + F5; will move VO cursor to the mouse pointer.

Try one of these instead of toggling VO next time you are at the Lock Screen and cannot get focus to type in your password.