macOS 10.12 Sierra: What’s New and Changed for Blind and Low Vision Users

I didn't see any mention of the new Voiceover trick; VO+N. This will bring up a list of any currently visible alerts going across the screen at the given time. How to interact with them you ask? I'm not quite sure, and haven't been for this entire beta period.
Also, another notable change is that you'll now be asked if you'd like to delete voice files when you clear their associated check boxes in the Voiceover utility provided that they're not being used at all for TTS Options in system preferences for example.

Hi i had the beta of MacOS Seirra on my MAc. i had saw one change: for VarioUltra users, MacOS supports in usb connection for this braille display. it doesn't support in the option disc that allows to copy and paste things, but it's very welcomed and very importent.

Hi all, for those who are running ios 10 and Mac os Sierra do you have to he using Bluetooth low energy to get it to work?

I see the issue wheer the name of emojis would be read letter by letter has been fixed.

the clipboardone is not working for me

For those who can’t get the Universal Clipboard to work, here are 3 things to check:

1. Are all devices using the same Apple ID.
2. Is your Mac compatible with the Continuity feature.
3. Is Hand-off enabled on all devices.

One of the biggest reasons I'm still on Yosemite is the activity-switching that actually works in apps with web views, including Safari. That still appears unfixed in Sierra.

At this point I'm thinking that if I'm not going back to Windows then I'd just better get used to life without activities. They were introduced in Yosemite and, contrary to features in subsequent releases, actually appear to work 100% reliably. I really want to like future releases of the OS, but this reluctance to get these silly bugs fixed is a big part of why it's so hard to welcome upgrades, and until Apple gets its thing together, I'm really not willing to play a game of "Guess the Bug".

When reading articles on CNN, I noticed Voiceover would randomly stop interacting with the web content. For example, I'd be reading in Safari reader and suddenly, Voiceover would announce, "Web content," and I have to interact with it and start reading again. Is anyone else able to reproduce this?

I just updated last night and into this morning, and thus far I like it. QuickNav does seem to be a bit easier to toggle. I saw Siri listed in my applications, but haven't started playing around with it yet. But in addition to a better QuickNav, I'm noticing that Alex is even a bit faster on my system.

Hi has anyone noticed when hitting the emogee button in the messages app, when you pick your emogee, voiceover don't read the type of emogee.
When i interact with the scroll area it says there's stuff there, but voiceover doesn't see it

If you are a heavy user of Karabiner and Seal as I am, please don't do what I did and upgrade and end up with an unhappy surprise. Due to some serious changes with the mouse and keyboard drivers made in Sierra, they're completely unusable. The developer is working on a new solution, Karabiner Elements, but currently you have to have a fairly comprehensive knowledge of JSON structure to edit the configuration files by hand, or be a fairly quick study. I wouldn't recommend it if you aren't fairly comfortable with this...

With QuickNav off, in an edit field, I can no longer use option with left and right arrow to move by word. Instead, it treats the block of text as one big word. This is a *huge* problem for me. aS in, almost a deal breaker. Essentially, my capacity to edit in Safari, which I use a *lot* for work, is super broken. Along with the breakage of Karabiner, which I mentioned above and which essentially makes my work keyboard useless to me, this upgrade just plain sucks for me. I wish I hadn't touched it. Worst OS upgrade I've ever had so far!

When a notification is shown on screen, Voiceover automatically interrupts whatever it is doing to read it. It is very frustrating to have to turn do not disturb on if at the time of working I get a bunch of notifications.

Hi All
One of my favourite features of the recent IOS10 upgrade was the inclusion of Tapbacks in the Messages App.
I am told that Tapbacks have also been included in the Messages App on this Sierra release.
The only trouble is that, though the process is intuitive on IOS, I've yet to figure out how to do it on Sierra.
Can anyone teach me how to do a quick Tapback to an iMessage on Sierra?
Many thanks,
@SeaNoEvil00

I've updated to Sierra but notice significant bug for low sight users reliant on running Voiceover and Zoom feature in parallel. Zoom works fine by itself but once Voiceover turned on alongside it, focus does not follow the mouse pointer and the user can't pan at all when using full screen zoom mode. Anyone else encountered this and any workarounds? I'd hold fire on upgrading for any folks who are heavy users of both as Zoom becomes next to useless for voiceover users

I'm a bit disappointed that all we got as far as VO goes is a few little tweaks, though those are good (especially the turning off anouncing of new table rows). What Mac configs is everyone running Sierra on? In general, the OS seems a bit slower for me and I get the VO busy message a lot, accompanied I'm sure by the dreaded spinning beach ball on the screen. I've noticed Siri is so slow that it's not worth bothering with. All that could be though, that I'm running Sierra on a standard mid 2012 MBP (4gb ram, 500gb HDD), which I think you can, amazingly, still buy from Apple. I'm not sure paying a bunch to upgrade ram and stick an SSD in there would be any more worth it than just jumping off the macos ship and going back to windows.

When sending an email with an attachment, Voiceover reads the message body field as, "Object replacement character edit text." I have not encountered this when sending emails without attachments, in which case Voiceover reads the message body field as expected without the object replacement character.

Brian, maybe you should consider doing a clean install of Mac OS Sierra. Personally I find Sierra to be a improvement both in terms of over all snappyness and VO is also faster compared to El Capitan. I hated El Capitan, it was dog slow and VO was also very slow but so far Sierra is a welcome improvement. Even though my late 2013 iMac feels much faster again, I'm anyway going to do a clean Sierra install as soon as I have some free time over a weekend.
BTW a SSD and doubling of the RAM in that machine of yours is definatly worth it, I have a few friends with that same machine who had good results doing the SSD and RAM thing, some only did the SSD and still saw improvement.

One very nasty bug on the web seems to be squashed. In 10.11, there were some tables that would cause VO to say "table with 1 row, 0 columns" and then, rather than reading the table, it would simply be blank. The only way to read these was to tab to them if they had controls as part of the table. Needless to say they had far more than one row and no columns, too. I'm happy to say that so far, in Sierra, I've tried all the tables I know of that do this and they don't have that problem anymore. For that fix alone, I'd keep the update as I encountered these daily in my professional life.

I'm noticing that in Sierra, I can actually scroll through controls in Braille while panning rather than being stuck and having to move to the next control. This is particularly nice on web pages. Braille seems to be smooth and change focus appropriately, as it has done on iOS for some time. Very happy!

Yes, I can turn the one row announcement off. But Voiceover stills have the same behavior. If I'm Twitter in live streaming mode Vo keeps losing focus of the tweet. So it is not possible, for example, to spell a tweet.

It was a wonderful review of the new features/abilities in the new mac os.

Have any users of virtual machines updated? If so, what are you doing to get your caps lock key to be workable now that Karabiner and Seal are no longer options? I've been looking at different alternatives, and so far nothing quite does what i need it to. I need this for work, and *really* didn't want to have to spend my entire weekend completely erasing my Mac and restoring selectively from new, but I guess that's what I get for being an idiot and not cloning before I upgraded..... Here's to a wonderful freaking weekend in my world, guys! Just allow me to take this moment to say, once again, how very much I hate Sierra right now! That is all.

Sierra supports the Orbit Reader 20. This is fantastic news as I will be ordering one of these around Christmas time. I still wish we had an autoscroll feature so that the screen reader could pan the display automatically. Keep suggesting it to Apple and they might add it next year.

Has anyone noticed that, in applications like night owl, pressing escape no longer causes auto-complete suggestions to populate edit boxes? This seems to be a universal thing (I tried in Coda and XCode as wel) and it doesn't seem to work anywhere.

Honestly, I am far from impressed from this update. Let me explain the reason why.

First off, it’s true that #Siri conversations are accessible, but the amount of interaction to read Siri's output in some cases, say to read the forecast or information about sports, is insane; and no, tabbing through the items does not work.

In my case #VoiceOver keeps its place in a web page much worse than before. E.G. Toggling quick nav on/of while the previous page is loading is enough for it to leave the focus at the beginning of the page. I suspect race conditions in the implementation, but I won’t go deeper into technical details ;) Anyway, on my machine #Safari behaves much worse than in previous versions; I hear the “Safari busy” message much more often and sometimes Safari freezes completely, not accepting any command for a few seconds.

While some bugs in #mail have been fixed, it’s still far from perfect. And there are even some regressions, such as the inability to tab/shift+tab between the folders list and the messages table when using the classic layout. In addition to this, “Mail busy” message is still a friend of us and reading complex HTML messages without getting crazy is still very, very far…

Saying that basic text editing works is perhaps too much. We still don’t have access to tables in #TextEdit (and in any standard #NSTextView instance). Toggling the layout to vertical in any NSTextView will cause Vo to stop reading the document at all. And many, many text attributes are not exposed through the #accessibility API yet (and often the accessibility API doesn’t even support them), so for instance we can forget about #Vo telling us when a text fragment is an heading or browsing a very long document by headings. Also VoiceOver does not work reliably with tables in pages documents when the document is very long (10+ pages). And advanced formatting is still a dream on the #mac. So yeah, #Apple definitely needs to work *a lot* on text editing!

Regarding VoiceOver support for #Braille displays (oh, has it ever had a serious support for them?), apart from giggling, I can say that nothing has changed. The same, very poor support is there without any improvements.

Finally, I have to say that I am getting tired of Vo/accessibility limitations on the mac. With this major release Apple lost an important chance to *really* improve things… I’ve stopped suggesting blind users using a mac in professional/educational areas some time ago, but now I’m really considering abandoning the OS myself. It’s unacceptable that in 2016 we still have to deal with “app_name busy” messages, Vo behaving strangely with complex web pages, an unacceptable iBooks screen reader usage experience, a very poor support for Braille displays that prevents you from *really* taking advantage of them and, most of all, with the lack of a decent support for reading PDF documents. Apple needs to work a lot more on Mac OS accessibility and increase its efforts in improving it, as it is really far from the high quality standards of iOS accessibility. But I’m worried that this will never happen, as they even stopped listening to our feedbacks and/or not acting on what they listen to; otherwise the Mac accessibility wouldn’t be so poor!

This is a low-vision issue: in previous Safari versions, there was a setting to prevent showing text below a specified point size. This feature is missing in macOS Sierra, and I'm unable to find a workaraound, other than creating custom CSS of some sort.

Hello Vincenzo,

The more calm and lucid review of Mac OS accessibility I have read in a long time.

It completely sucks for students as advanced text editing and pdf reading do not work.
It completely sucks for devs as advanced text editing and internet naviggation do not work. At this time, xcode is no more than a stupid comedy and so is the terminal. Yes, it is possible to make things, as ultimately navigating the web and editing text, but at standards of the mid of 90s speaking of accessibility.
While sighted people are way productive on their macs on xcode and so we are making an insane amount of non documented, non reliable, strange work arounds to survive. Slow, not productive, and thiis is not to speak about the insane fear that Apple will break something we deppend on to run xcode and ultimately keep our jobs and study goingg on each small xcode update and each system update.
It *** completely *** sucks on web navigation.
Again a slow process, with VO getting unstable, loosing its focus, not behaving well on complex pages and, folks, we devs at least the normal ones who do not have 80 whole apis completely on top of their heads do need to access complex pages.
Speaking of memory, do you want to have full access to code completion in a productive way just like your sighted counterparts coleags do? Forget it. By the way, if you need to setup activities for xcode or terminal to makke punctuation be read in a different way, be aware that activity switching on the mac is no more than again a terrible bad written comedy ..
It completely sucks for braille readers.

I won't say that the system is unusable. For basic tasks and simple web navigation it is poorly usable.
For audio editing, because of Amadeus pro (not because of the system) it is a pleasant task.

And on each new os release, which happens once a year, we have to hear: "hey, what a cool release! Now VO no longer have a insignificant ridiculous small bug introduced 5 years ago!"
Real improvements on pdf reading, text editing, web navigation, xcode? Oh no, this is still to comme ... and we know it will never come.

But that's ok. Voiceover is a free screen reader distributed for free on every os release and it is fairly good for basic stuff, even better than narrator, its coleag on the Windows system.

So heavy users deserv a better screen reader. I got it. So let's write one or even better let's extend and script voiceover .... oh we can not because most accessibility apis are not openned to outsiders, the few that are open are stupdly poor documented and the few that are openned and documented are kind of buggy.

So what?

I'll keep up with Mac os, I deppend on it because of xcode. I am afraid of upgrading because of reports of safari keeping constantly busy busy, a crap that we do not have as much in os 10.11. If my access to safari, whon I deppend heavily on to read tutorials and api documentation, deteriorate even more I'll be in trouble.

My MBA is not capable of running windows, low storage and low memory. If I could I would use windows on fusion **** oooops, I can't anyways because we do not have a decent key manager for a time ** but if I had it I would use exclusively windows to make my tasks other than coding for iOS. Mac are exxpensive machines that do not deliver acceptable accessibility for their prices.

Again what makes me sad is that they do not, but they certainly could offer that accessibility level. And the system as a whole is cool, only the accessibility is poor. If Apple allowed us to tweak vo we could do so many things to make it comme to an acceptable level, like we did in so many other readers.

Oh well:

1- Apple won't change.
2- We will deppend on this crap should we keep working with iOS development.
3- All this is a huge time loss. Nobody will read, nobody cares, nothing will happen. I wish Apple could hire me or some other more talented blind people I know and let us fully alocated to solve Mac OS specific accessibility problems. I wish Apple would open VO for scripting like every other SR in the world is actually. I wish Apple did with Mac accessibility what they did with iOS accessibility. They have the expertise to do it but not the will to do it. I wish VO on Mac os had a chance to ** really succeed ** but I have almost no hope.

Marlon

Hello again everyone. I've had very good luck with this update so far. But one small bug I've found is that when navigating through forms, neither VO-Right arrow nor Tab takes me to the "Submit Button." What I have to do is tab twice to "Cancel" or whatever that button is called on a given website, and then Shift-tab one time. But I can deal with that. Even so, hopefully this bug will be fixed in subsequent patches. Regarding #Siri, this is my first time using it and I've found it to be pretty awesome. What's more, I like how it can be adjusted independent from VoiceOver.

I am a big Knight Rider fan so, my drives are named after parts of the show to reflect this. I notice with Voice Over now, my drives are read to me three times, or twice. For instance, what I mean is this.
Let's say I do a command-shift-a to go to the applications folder and then get out of it as I didn't mean to go in that folder. I press command-w and it takes me to my desktop. Then Voice over says Knight 2000 knight 2000 knight 2000.
Note, the first time is ok. But, then Voice over repeats that two more times. I did speak to someone in accessibility today and they were able to reproduce this issue. When I asked about this on VORail, I got the answer to reformat the machine and start from scratch. I don't want to do that unless it is absolutely necessary.
I told the representative this information and they said, let me try to reproduce this before we take that step. They were able to reproduce the steps that I took and they said they would submit this as an issue. They also told me not to reformat. So VoiceOver needs a bit of work when it comes to reading drives. It should only read them once. Not twice or three times.

Hi All, I'm not sure if this is just a Sierra bug or if it had been here previously, but I've noticed that in pages, tables which span more than one page are not properly announced. The first page is fine, but if I wanted to go from the last row on the first page, down to the first line on the second page and below, it won't let me. I have some vision so I was able to click with the mouse on the second page to keep working on the table, but that doesn't always work and the visual voiceover cursor no longer follows what is being spoken. If I go back to the first page though, everything is normal again. Although the bug is always there it reacts slightly differently almost every time so I wasn't sure how to report it to Apple.

Hello,

VoiceOver could be so much better on both platforms if Apple simply slowed down and quit releasing software every single year. I would be willing to wait two or three years for a Mac OS or iOS update is significant amounts of time were put into actually improving the screen reader. iOS and the Mac both ned better text accessibility. I can't comment on everything since I do not need advanced text editing functions. I'm not sure if there is anything we can do though. Apple does what they want and if you don't like it, you can take a hike. I do wish that more improvements were made in Sierra. I'm not noticing anything earth shatteringly new or better. Again, this is what happens when you constantly update your software and don't take the time to fully develop and test improvements. I wish we still had operating systems like Leopard and Snow Leopard which were really stable and fantastic in my opinion. However, I think that era of Apple is long gone along with Jobs.

May I politely desagree with you, sir?

The discussion might get way too technical .. but I am a huge supporter of continuous integration.

I would preffer to have a weekly update ratter than a bi anual one.

But in order for this to take place bug fixing shall have a high priority.

I would loove to see Apple actively emproving VoiceOver and the OS accessibility in general and delivering fast, small and eficient packages every often.

The way things are now is we wait one year to have some bugs fixed and others introduced. Bugs are not clearly identified, tracked and people have no reliable way of knowing if they will ever be fixed and at what cost cinse the very same package fixing one bug might very well break something else.

If we kept packages small and one apart from others it would be easy to rollback something broken while still having access to new implementations and other stuff.

Closed the way Apple is they have to be the perfect company in order to let everyone satisfied. They once almost were or at least I thought so but they nolonger are so it should be time to change the way the public can deal with them.

I do not know if VO could be a separate package. Sure some stuff is integrated on the OS but not all. As an example, the stupid verbosity of voiceover on iOS 10 web navigation is something likely noot hooked to the OS, possibly the API's now return this info but the option of using it or not is not definned possibly on the OS itself. So releasing a package implementing the choice option of navigation verbosity could very well be distributed without having to wait for a major system release making us more quickly free of this ridiculous uimplementation they just did.

As far as I'm aware, this isn't possible. Mac OS X and iOS are not as modular as Android. This is where TalkBack trumps VoiceOver on Android. VO is too deeply integrated into the core of the operating system. I am not a programmer, so I do not know if that is completely true or not, but it seems to be from what I've heard.

Hello everyone,
I installed Sierra twice. the first time the installation file I am pretty sure was corrupted. when I tried installing it, I could not get any speech in the installation window, and the box just sat there. It was stuck at 30 percent for around 3 hours. I then hard rebooted, a definite no no but given that I had no other choice, I really didn't have any other options. It did not boot up normally as could be expected but instead tried to re-initialize the installation which once again broke. I then managed to somehow load into recovery, and was able to use a time machine backup to restore my machine. After that, my installation was fairly straight forward and things seem to be running smoothly now.
As for my thoughts, the upgrade was definitely worth it. I definitely find it snappier, and programs just seem to load faster and with little to no voiceover lag. The one thing I have noticed is the emoji dialogue box in the messages app is cluttered to say the least, and an area I believe apple accessibility needs to improve on given how popular emoji's are now. The other thing I found was with siri. I tried asking it what the weather was going to be like, and all the response I got was, "it's going to be cloudy today", nothing more. I was hoping for more of a report than that. Has anyone else noticed that with siri?
Other than that, I like the update and I believe it is a lot more bug free than el capitan or Yosemite were.

thank you for being intelligent and speak openly of the great problem of accessibility in Mac OS.
I fully agree with everything that you wrote.
accessibility in Mac OS is dead.
Mac OS could be the el dorado for us blind, but apple is no longer interested in listening to us and go back to being serious and responsible as in the past.
I already predicted this a long time, the time to sell my imac and back again to the windows.
It will make four years that I abandoned the Mac OS, and went back to windows.
today I use windows and I am happy and very satisfied because I do much more than I would in Mac OS.
accessibility on VO in Mac OS is dead.
I'm sure that accessibility more and more in Mac OS OR IOS, will become worse in the present and future.
Apple does not care about the quality control in the resolution of issues in accessibility.
Apple does not hear us, and does not address accessibility issues in the cycles of betas every time a new version of the systems comes out
Apple does not solve the issues reported by the blind in the feedback app.

this is already proven in the past and now in recent IOS 10, and Mac OS sierra.
again, thank you for speaking the truth ...
cheers.

Voiceover, especially circa 2009, 10, and 11 when I was first getting into OS X, was so very promising! every release was bringing new and badly needed Voiceover improvements to the table. But it seems to me that since around 2012 or 2013, Voiceover has been fairly stagnant. I agree that accessibility, at least on OS X, is at a virtual standstill. Occasionally old bugs are fixed or a new one is introduced, but the improvements we've been requesting for years are still not forthcoming. Very, very disheartening when OS X has so much promise! I'm really starting to believe that as a serious developer or in a professional setting, you just can't rely solely on MacOS.

Hello!

No, so far I have not been able to replicate that bug. I have tried on a few different websites, including this comment field, and navigating word-by-word works fine for me.

Overall I think this OS runs better than previous versions. VoiceOver is quicker, especially when switching between windows.

I never liked JAWS, which was one reason why I switched to Mac. Sure JAWS is more powerful, but I think it is a bit unfair to compare an expensive, commercial software to a built-in one... If there is a profitable market for it I am sure JAWS would release a good Mac version.

I agree Larry that this OS update runs better then updates in the past.

It's Apple's fault that there are no third party screen readers on the mac. Apple will not open up the OS to make third party options possible. I do not believe that profit has anything to do with it.

If it's not fair to compare expensive Jaws to voice over then we can just compare NVDA. If an open source screen reader created primarily for free, can make voice over look like a joke, it's pretty o obvious that Apple, the most profitable compony in the world, does not prioritize accessibility on the mac.

Has anyone found a setting to stop the position of applications in the doc being announced? In other words, I just want app name not the information relating to its position, and the number of items, to be spoken. As an example, VO now says "finder 1 of 29" on my system. This is far too verbose in my view and wasn't the case prior to this update.