macOS Sonoma: New Features, Changes, Improvements, and Bugs for Blind and Low Vision Users

Oh no it's even worse than that.

Take this line of code:

self.test = test

I put the cursor on the s of self. Now I press Option+right arrow.. I would expect to hear "self". Instead I hear "self period test". But, don't be fooled. The cursor is after the dot. S.

As if that wasn't confusing enough, I press Option+right again. And hear "self period test for a second time.". Now the cursor is where it sounds.

I am having to use all my will power not to go on a long foul-mouthed rant at this point. This is making my job about ten times harder.

I should say this example was in PyCharm and reproduced in Smultron. If I try the same in Text Edit and switch to the same Activity I use for the other 2 apps so I can hear punctuation, then Text Edit does not read any punctuation at all when moving option+right.

Well...I updated to OS Sonoma last week and have used it a bit. I'm still more or less getting used to the new QuickNav in Safari, but it totally makes sense. I also like the individual voice settings. I was under the weather this weekend so didn't do much, but I think this week I should have more time to play around with the new release.

To those like me who continue to use voices such as Daniel even though it can't read items surrounded by smart quotes when at the beginning or end of a phrase, I have found a work-around if you don't want punctuation being read to you. If you are happy hearing "Left double quotation mark test right double quotation mark," you need not do anything else, VoiceOver should read correctly if your punctuation is set like that. However, if you are happy hearing just, "test," you can do the following:
1. Fire up VoiceOver Utility (V O-F8)
2. Press command 2, or go through the table to Verbosity, then select text.
3. Under the punctuation popup menu, select customise. We are going to ad a custom group, as VoiceOver does not allow us to modify the default stuff.
4. Press Add Punctuation group, and then in the menu that appears, select "Create group based off Some," or "Create group based off none," whatever your preference.
5. VoiceOver will not put you in the name field by itself, so go to the groups table, find the group (It will probably be called group 1,) press V O-Space, and then call it whatever you wish. I have called mine More.
6. Go to the add punctuation button and press it.
7. Go back into the table and you will find an item that says "punctuation entry." Press V O-Space, and then press option left bracket (The key to the right of P if you are using the British layout.) This will insert a symbol that VoiceOver calls "Left double quotation mark."
8. In the popup menu that currently says "Ignore," change that to "Remove." Don't worry, when scrolling by character VoiceOver will still read this normally.
9. Click "Add punctuation" once again and go back to the table. In the Punctuation Character box, V O-Space once again, then press option shift left bracket. This will produce "Right double quotation mark," if you are on the British keyboard layout. I believe this works for US too, although results may vary. If nothing else, I will insert the symbols at the bottom of the comment, so you can copy and paste if you need to.
10. In the popup box, select Remove, once again. This is different to Ignore, because I think Remove means that VoiceOver will not process the punctuation when it sees it when reading text. Again, you will still hear it when reading over it by character and sometimes by word? I will have to see how that goes.
11. Select done.
12. Finally, turn VoiceOver off then back on, then select the new punctuation group from your Punctuation popup menu, or of course, press V O-V to bring up the verbosity menu, use left and right arrows to find Punctuation, then select the one you want and press return.

I hope that this can be helpful to those using voices that don't correctly read quotes at the moment. In case you need the symbols to copy and paste, here they are, with the left quote then right quote respectively.
“
”

Note that you will need to add separate entries as I showed above, and using shift 2 to insert a quotation mark is not the same thing, according to VoiceOver. Please do not ask me why this is the case, I do not know. :)

Sounds like a good tip. Just one word of warning, Custom punctuation groups do not work with activities. Or at least they didn't in Ventura and older versions. As nothing much seems to be fixed in Sonoma I'm guessing it still doesn't work.

I really wish they would fix it as I only want punctuation spoken when coding and the default set is stupidly verbose.

As well as all the other problems I've found today, I seem to have experienced a lot of funny little focus issues that haven't quite been consistent enough to reproduce.

Now let's be honest, Ventura and earlier macOS versions are bad and it's not uncommon to focus to be all over the place and for random stuff to happen all the time. It was frustration with Ventura's bugs that convinced me to try the new version.

But I now just have the feeling that all the previous problems have just been aggravated further. I've had problems in Mail just trying to navigate up and down the mail list. I found that sometimes I'd get to the top, then go down and find that instead of going down the list it started reading some random mail out. But before then I was having all sorts of trouble just getting focus into the message list at all.

Again in PyCharm I find navigating the window is more erratic. For example, I'd press Cmd+6 to go to the Problems pane. I'd usually have to VO+right to get to the tree, then I can use up and down arrows to see what problems are in the current file. This works now but only occasionally. I usually have to go vo+left and right a bit on the tree to get it to work. I wonder if maybe the text cursor and VO cursor aren't quite in step.

And I've had a few occasions on this forum where I've been convinced I've been typing into the Subject only to find my text in the comment body.

Just lots and lots of tiny things that make me question my own sanity.

But I'm amazed no one else is talking about this sort of thing. My experience with Sonoma after a day has been totally disastrous. This is very very significantly worse than Ventura, which in itself was awful. There hasn't been a single thing I've tried to do on my Mac that has worked as expected. Whether it be Mail, Outlook, Safari, Chrome, PyCharm, Smultron... probably the only apps that haven't been negatively impacted are Skype and Spotify. (And oddly Spotify might be a curious benefactor of the horrible new VO+J behaviour)

Am I really the only one feeling this way? Or was everyone else unhappy with Ventura too sensible to upgrade?

I'm not experiencing any issues of focus moving to unexpected places, and I'm running Sonoma.

I took some time today to read through the posts from Mr Grieves and others. Mr Grieves has found a lot of small changes that impact his work, and is expending considerable time documenting them here. I thank him for that. I could easily see myself doing the same thing if I had upgraded. This is why I chose to delay the upgrade.

I wonder if anyone has ever done an estimate of the net productivity cost of upgrades? Not just for blind users, and not just Macs. But every time a new app or device or anything with a UI comes out with a redesign, and all our accumulated muscle memory goes out the window, and we all spend time standing around the proverbial water cooler describing the minutia and pointlessness of the many changes and overall UI weirdness that has been foisted upon us. Is it maybe 4 hours per person? Or maybe 6? Multiplied by, what, a hundred thousand people? So let's say 500,000 man-hours down the drain. At $30 an hour, that's $15 million, wasted.

I'm in the middle of a months-long editing project, and there is no way I can upgrade to Sonoma if I'm to stay on schedule. I don't have time to discover all the issues cited by Mr Grieves and others, nor do I have the time to find workarounds for those issues.

Back when I developed software ... Okay, okay, I'll spare you that rant. LOL.

I have upgraded and I like this new version.
The main problem I found is the activity change to the default one when moving VO cursor.

I think the most annoying bug for me is VO do not recognize the menu extras which I reported back in the beta cycle but they didn't fix it. When I enter the menu extras, VoiceOver play the ding sound, indicating there is nothing.

Maybe this is obvious, but I found that the activity switching bug seems to happen when the focus changes however it's done. I was using terminal and switched tabs with ctrl+tab and found that the activity changed. This was also the case in Smultron. Or in Spotify if I press Cmd+L to search it also will switch activity. I think every time the focus changes to a new control, the Mac thinks the app has just been switched to and reacts accordingly. Maybe this is a bit optimistic, but I wonder if this could be causing some other subtle little bugs as well.

So after battling all day yesterday with PyChar, and noticing some of the problems in Smultron and Skype I was getting a bit irritated that I couldn't do the same in Apple apps like Mail or Text Edit.

But I finally found somewhere that shows the same bug.

1. Set punctuation to Full.
2. Open Safari
3. Press Cmd+L to go to the address bar
4. Type in: https://one.two/three.four/give.six
5. Put the text cursor at the beginning of the line
6. Now press Option+right to move through the URL.

Each segment is spoken twice. E.g. it will say "one period two" then you press option plus right and it will say it again before continuing.

Please someone else tell me they are seeing this??

Hello everyone,

I am also seeing the Calendar and Activities issue on Mac OS 14.

The only work around is, to set the Activities on a per application bases.

Hello,
It appears that punctuation, including custom groups, can work on a per activity basis. I have an activity that activates whenever I use a text editor like Pages, and to test I set the activity to use my custom group and set the default to All. The results were exactly as I expected. If you have an activity and cannot find the punctuation, it might be worth resetting the activity to the settings you currently have for VoiceOver? Obviously, if you have changed every setting under the sun for that activity, that might not be a very convenient option. However, you might not even have to do that...

I hope this information can be useful. I will also say that it appears that MacOS 14.1 beta 2 somewhat fixes problems for those of us using caps lock as a modifier. Scrolling over a text field will no longer interrupt you and show the caps lock alert, instead you just hear the alert sound. If you release caps lock, while caps lock is on, the alert will then come up properly, and you can get rid of it by disabling caps lock, or pressing back space then navigating away from the text field. Or of course, control tab will also take you out of the text field and get rid of the alert. Note that the issues regarding quotes and repeated characters and activities are all still present.

So my default activity has "Some" for punctuation, and I have a Coding activity set to "All". I tried setting this to my Coding punctuation group which was taken from All, and has its own replacement for period so it says dot.

I have the Coding activity trigger when I switch to PyCharm. In this scenario I am not really hearing any punctuation as I am moving up and down lines. If I move to a dot it is pronounced period still.

I should say that earlier this year I moved to a new Mac and set up VoiceOver from scratch because I was hoping it might fix some of the problems I was having. Sadly not. But the activity and punctuation groups were fresh then when using Ventura.

I did report it to Apple a while back and I'm sure I reproduced all the behaviour in Text Edit. If I can find the motivation sometime I will reset all settings to default and then just set this up on its own to try to rule anything else out, but right now this is personally the least of my worries given how bad the rest of the Sonoma experience is.

It does make me wonder what is different about my setup. Maybe I should try an American voice as they seem to be the only ones that can cope with punctuation.

OK I was trying not to get distracted by this but I couldn't help it. I created a new activity, set my punctuation to Coding and changed the voice to an American.

So on the whole, no punctuation is getting spoken, including dots. However, I found one line which was like this:

logger.info(a.b)

And it speaks "logger dot info a b". This is the only place I have heard it speak dot. Just after "logger". If I put the cursor on the dot it still speaks period not dot.

I copied this line into Text Edit and it's the same.

So I then switched to my Coding activity, which is now back to All punctuation. And bizarrely it is speaking all the other dots (as periods) but in the case of logger it just says "logger info". No dot, or period or anything.

I think I am going mad. Maybe this is all a terrible nightmare and I am going to wake up any time now.

Something I've been noticing a lot is quite often when I use Cmd+Tab to switch application, the first application is not spoken. Well, tell a lie, it will try and then immediately stop. For example, if the first application is Smultron, it will do a very brief hiss as if it's trying to pronounce the S but not getting very far. I get this all the time when switching from Smultron or PyCharm, but not noticed it anywhere else yet. It might be because they have a custom activity associated with them perhaps.

If I hold down Cmd and keep pressing tab then subsequent apps are spoken correctly. If

Yes, that is indeed because of the activity switching. You can test it by going into an app which does not have its own activity and then switching normally with command tab. You should find that it will speak the application normally.

The other VoiceOver issues mentioned, as well as app incompatibility, has now become such an issue to me that I might go back to Ventura...

I can't reproduce the issue you mentioned, but I'm not using activities.

However, here is another Command+tab issue, and it's been around for several releases with no change.

1. Press Command+Tab multiple times, and notice that, for each app, VoiceOver announces the app name. This is expected, correct behavior.
2. Press VO+M to bring VoiceOver focus to the menu bar.
3. Repeat step 1 by pressing Command+Tab multiple times. In my experience, the first app name is announced correctly, but subsequent apps are all incorrectly announced as, "Apple." I would expect the same behavior as in step 1.

Sorry, I've lost track of when this issue was introduced. Possibly the first Ventura release, not sure. The obvious workaround is to escape out of the menu bar before switching apps, but it's unclear why this should be necessary.

Hi,
I wrote to Apple regarding the huge spike in resource usage when using Safari and VoiceOver.
This leads to the information flow between VoiceOver, Safari and the user being suspended. The popular "Safari busy" Bug.
I recorded their screencast showing the problem.
I received an e-mail from them asking me to generate a diagnostic file.
I thought that if everyone who also experiences this problem took all these steps, maybe they would get serious about fixing it.
So I encourage you.

Here is the information from apple:
Hello Adrian,

Thank you for your email. We appreciate you taking the time to bring this to our attention and for including a screen recording of the behavior you described.

To assist with our investigation, we’d like to receive a log file from your device that is generated after the behavior is reproduced again. Please review the following steps, and let us know if you have any questions.

Log capture process:
1. Reproduce the issue, and make a note of the exact hour and minute.
2. Open the Activity Monitor app.
3. Navigate to the toolbar and press VO Shift Down to interact.
4. VO Right to find and select the Actions Menu Button.
5. VO Down to find and select System Diagnostics.
6. Select the OK button on the Privacy Agreement.
7. If requested, enter your password to allow the logs to gather.
8. When the diagnostic is complete, a “tmp” folder will open with the sysdiagnose file.
9. Select the log file, then select the Share button to send via Mail or a third-party cloud storage app.

Due to the size of sysdiagnose, we recommend sending the file using an iCloud.com email address, or uploading the file to a 3rd-party cloud storage service and sending us a link where we can download it.

When I mentioned the navigate by heading but above I was only seeing that in private web sites like Bitbucket etc. So here' an example of a public one:

1. Open Safari and browse to https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/iot-data/get-thing-shadow.html
2. Navigate by heading from the top. Keep goign until you get to "Note"
3. Navigate again to the next heading

The heading is read out as "2 items heading level 1". Which isn't a lot of help, particularly when navigating a long document.

In Ventura, it is read out as "2 items get-thing-shadow ¶ link"

I've sent this one to apple for what it's worth.

While the problem is occurring (e.g., an application is "not responding"), hold down Ctrl-Option-Command-Shift and type a full stop (period) character. The process will take minutes, but in the end, the Finder should be opened with focus on the newly created sysdiagnose file that should be sent to Apple.

That bug with using cmd+tab when the menu is selected is something I'm sure I have never noticed before. But as soon as I tried it, I now seem to be running into it all the time. It's like I'm constantly drawn to the bits of macOS that don't work properly.

I have also been noticing an increase in a problem I've been having before. In PyCharm, almost every time I change the editor I'm looking at, or the focus changes a bit, the cursor keys go weird. So normally going up and down a line means the whole line is spoken out. But sometimes it only seems to speak what I think is probably the word the cursor is on, or a random bit of punctuation or whatever. Which makes it almost impossible to read code. This happened quite a bit on Ventura, but is now happening all the time with Sonoma. It could be a chang win PyCharm, but I have seen this problem occur elsewhere from time to time.

It just means I am having to turn VoiceOver on and off every few minutes. I wish there was a keyboard shortcut to just restart VO.

The other thing I've noticed is that although the logon screen is better it's not perfect. You have to listen to Daniel prattle on until some random point when he gets to the date and time and then you are allowed to type. But this morning I had left it on the logon screen for a few minutes and then had to start VO to get any action. Honestly, this one is so far down my list of critical bugs it's hardly worth mentioning.

Oh yes and one more.... this maybe not a Sonoma thing, but maybe I'm just a bit more tuned into it. But I get a fair bit of crackle when Stephanie is reading out code. Like just for a second, then she carries on. My guess is that it is a consequence of the voice competing with the sound of the indentation which is now overlaid on top. I can't get this to happen on demand, and again it's minor compared to the whole operating system going to hell but it's still noticeable.

I've emailed Apple about several of the bugs I've mentioned so far. In one email I went through half a dozen or so. And the reply was inevitably for me to create one diagnostic log for every problem. So I've no idea when I'm going to get the time to do that. I suspect it's because they can't be bothered to try to reproduce them. I don't know why they never just ask for the VO settings file if they are struggling to reproduce an issue.

Hello,
Would you guise suggest e-mailing Apple over all of the accessibility bugs, rather than using Feedback Assistant? I have been doing the latter for all of the bugs I have mentioned here, but have had nothing done for any apart from one, where they said they could not diagnose the issue with the current information they had, that being the issue with quotes. I recorded it and added the recording to my feedback, and of course, ever since, absolutely nothing has happened.

Is an e-mail to their accessibility support more likely to get attention? Sorry, this is not a bug post, it is just a question regarding reporting them.

A small work-around for this:

1. After pressing VO + "m", press TAB by itself.
2. Command + Tab as normal.

HTH.😃

Just updated to Sonoma and so far so good. I did encounter the bug where my VO voice changed to Samantha but I easily changed it back to Alex. With respect to the single key quickNav, I agree that this is not a bug. If I Interact with the form field or tab to it, I can enter text normally without having to turn single key quick Nav off. Finally, I am no longer experiencing the VO bug at Login. Thanks Applevis, and everyone, for your comments on the new release.

Since updating to Sonoma, I noticed that VO J is not working as effectively in some apps. in Music, I used VO J to jump between categories in the Sidebar Table and the Music Browser and Music Table. Now, when I select a playlist, Songs, or Albums, VO J will jump to a Collection as if I have done a search.
I also noticed that, in Mail, VO J also acts erratically. When I did a search in Mail, VO J used to jump between Mailboxes and list of messages. Now, it jumps between the Favourites bar and the Toolbar.
I'm sure that I will find the same behaviour when I try it with other apps. This is unfortunate, because I used the VO J function frequently as a more efficient way to navigate some apps.
Hope this gets fixed in the next release. In the meantime, I will notify Apple Accessibility

God that link focus bug is really, really annoying.

I visit a music forum and each week they have new releases. Most of ythese are accompanied by a Spotify link. These threads go on for ages.

In the past clicking on a Spotify would do one of three random things depending on the gods of apple and how much they hate me at the time:

1. Open a new tab and ask me if I want to allow the link to open the Spotify app. The focus being on the question.
2. The same, but with focus somewhere randomly in the Safari toolbar so you need to go find the Allow button.
3. New tab, Spotify page, no prompt to allow Spotify.

Since Sonoma, I noticed there was an Always Allow option. So I pressed this. And now I've found one of two things happen on the link:

1.Spotify opens, no new tab. All is good. Have we found an actual improvement?
2. Sptoify opens, but when I go back to Safari it has opened a new tab on Spotify. If I close this tab, I go back to the forum and the focus is right at the top and I need to go all the way down and find my place again.

Seems about 50/50 so far which way it goes. But when it's 2 it it is incredibly annoying and slows me right down.

I'm guessing I'll see option 3 at same point.

Honestly, I think this has got to be the worst operating system upgrade I have ever seen. And I used Windows ME.

Navigate to I think this may be a little broken too. I've noticed on Applevis I usually use this to jump to the Subject box. But now it keeps reading and seems to go to the Comments box and beyond.

A possible work-around for returning to the spot you were at, on a previous page, once you click on a link that opens/opens in a new tab, window, universe, etc.

1. Before clicking on any link, press Shift + VO + 1 (this will add/remove a hotspot)
2. Whenever you return to that page, press VO + Left Bracket or right bracket to navigate between hotspots.

You can do this for numbers 1 thru 0, so have at it. 😃

If people don't think posting on this thread about this is ok, let me know and I'll take it down.

I don't want to cause drama or anything but I am curious, to those on macs, why stay when all of these bugs keep cropping up? Windows really isn't that bad and I can say that throughout the 20 or so year of using it, I've never come across a bug that made the system just stop working or anything like you've described here.

I don't use macOS anymore because of all these issues and Apple's lack of dedication to making the platform better. My Mac makes a nice Windows 11 laptop!

That's unfortunate to hear about the VO+J behavior change in the Mail app, as I regularly use VO+J to jump between the lists of mailboxes and messages.

Apple's own documentation for VO+J is vague. "Jump to a linked item (for example, from a message in the Mail messages list to the message preview)"

I have come to expect change in VO+J behavior in each new release. I've noticed it in both the Music and Messages app. It is a consequence of GUI redesign. I believe Apple is unlikely to back out the GUI redesign that introduced the change, so I believe the new behavior is a permanent change, or at least permanent until the next macOS revision, when VO+J will change again.

Control+Option+Command+Shift+Period. Nice tip, thanks. I don't even have to press VO+Tab first. If it's this easy, maybe I'll start submitting issues via the feedback assistant again.

That's not a bad idea. I will try to remember that for next time. I suspect it might not work in my particular case. I think the forums use Discourse or something, but the content tends to load on demand. When it does throw me off balance, if I navigate into the page a little and then go to item chooser and type "reply to post" I see a list of numbered posts. It starts off with numbers 1 through 8 or so, but then will suddenly jump up. Usually if I go here then I am a few posts after the one I was reading, so I just go back a bit. But usually I can't quite remember where I was so it takes a while. But I suspect the post I was reading probably wouldn't be loaded and therefore the web spot might not work. I've never had much luck with web spots but I do give up pretty easily with them.

I am also finding the VO+J change incredibly annoying.

Re "why don't you move to Windows" I think we have enough topics in this forum on that subject so let's not go there in here too.

I am noticing some other focus issues.

A number of times now I have navigated to the next button only to find that it has also interacted with the button so I am in the text, not the button. Then trying to actually give the button focus so I can click it takes a few goes going round the houses to find it. I had this last week and it's been on a few different places.

This next one I can't be sure is new in SOnoma but I think so. It's also quite specific. But if I am in Bitbucket and click a pipeline to view its profress, the focus jumps to the browser toolbar, so outside the web page altogether.

I didn't think it was possible for the Mac's focus to be any more erratic than Ventura, but turns out I was wrong.

I'm also getting a lot of Safari Not Responding issues. Maybe about as often as before, but they seem to be much worse when they do happen.

I'm also really not convinced they have even fixed the logon problem properly. It seems more or less OK last week but I've had some occasions where VoiceOver hasn't said anything on the logon screen and my password hasn't been expected, so I've had to restart it. Which is what it was doing before.

It would be good if there was a restart VoiceOver keyboard shortcut as I seem to be doing that on a very regular basis at the moment.

Maybe I should install the next beta. It surely can't be any worse, can it??

I've also not had much luck with the new VoiceOver settings. For example, I tweaked the timbre of Stephanie slightly and then noticed that it was pronouncing words very strangely. So "link" sounded more like "bing" to my uneducated ears, hat kind of thing. So back to defaults.

While I cannot speak for others here, I keep my Mac because I am using an older Intel-based Mac, which has a Bootcamp of Windows 10 on it, which I use often. 😃

I made this little script and posted it here a while back, it has very slightly been tweaked, and now presented for your viewing pleasure.
This tiny script will "restart" VO, regardless of where you are. Enjoy~

------


# A small script to restart VoiceOver. # You can place a "#" sign in front of the first line if you do not want speech, or simply replace "Daniel" with a different voice. # Remember to keep the name of the voice spelled properly with a capital first letter. # Finally you can play with the numbers for rate and volume, but the volume cannot go above "1". You can do a point value, to lower volume, however. say "Restarting VoiceOver" using "Daniel" speaking rate 265 volume 1 tell application "System Events" to key code 96 using command down delay 1 tell application "System Events" to key code 96 using command down # End of script.

HTH. 🤷🏻‍♂️

OK, I've maybe finally found something in Sonoma that isn't irritating me. Well, obviously give it time...

I heard about how to do this on the Double Tap podcast. But if you are in Safari looking at a web page, then go to the Safari toolbar and click the Share button, you can choose to the the web page in the Dock. When you then open it, it's a nice, self-contained app.

For example, I often listen to BBC Radio 6 Music, and I'll have that as a tab in Safari. Then if I suddenly need to pause it, I need to try to find the tab or window which I always find is easier said than done in Safari given that Ctrl+Tab only works if it can be bothered.
Now I can just open it up and cmd+tab to it separately. And Spotlight seemed to find it too.

You can turn off all the toolbar buttons too. So I wonder if this might be useful for some things that keep putting the focus on the toolbar.

It doesn't seem to have multiple tabs, but you can open things up in separate windows.

OK not strictly speaking an accessibility thing but interesting and might make some things a little easier.

(I believe Chrome already lets you do this sort of thing, and I remember over a decade ago doing it in Opera, but as Safari is the least terrible browser on the Mac with VO I feel stuck with it.)

OK, so I think if you turn VO on and off on the login screen, then it disabled VoiceOver in the login screen (under Lock Screen option in System Settings).

I think if I turn on my Mac and leave it for a minute or two, then try to login then it doesn't work. At least I don't get the clicks on the password, so as far as I am aware it's doing nothing. So I turn VO off then on and now it's disabled it for the next time too.

So seems like one of the only things they fixed in VO is still a bit broken.

Hello friends! I recently switched to MacOS Ventura with my new Air M2 from MacBook Air 2017 running OS Monterey and noticed a concidarable downgrade in the way VO handles auto language detection with Daniel English and Milena Russian voices. It also seems to ignore customary verbosity punctuation settings with secondary voice. What can be said about language detection in MacOS 14 Sonoma?

Hello,
I am not sure if this is unique to MacOS 14.1 beta 3 which I am currently running, but here is the situation with Russian on Sonoma. Please note that I am studying it, so I hope you can excuse anything I happen to get wrong or miss out. I will try to describe what it is currently like in the public release and what to expect in 14.1. For simplicity, I will just say that I am also using Daniel for English, but Siri voice 1 in Russian.

I think that the main thing to consider is how the actual characters are read. In Ventura, you may notice that Daniel will read the characters in English, for example, Cyrillic letter veh. However, in 14.0.3, the current public release, VoiceOver tries to switch to the right language when reading characters. This works better sometimes than others. for Russian, it is alright, although there is one thing to be aware of.
As the characters are read out, you will hear the character followed by пробел (Space,) about twenty or so times. With the Siri voice, it pauses before saying that, so you can just about catch the letter. For example: В, пробел, пробел, пробел... However, there are other letters that were read by, of all voices, the Ukrainian one. Here, it would be very hard to catch, particularly if your default speech rate is 100%. You would here something like а пробел пробел пробел пробел... To those English readers who do not take Russian, I apologise sincerely if VoiceOVer does not read this correctly...
MacOS 14.1 beta 3 goes back to the old behaviour of Daniel reading every letter if the language is set to the default, but if you manually set to Russian you will still hear every letter followed by пробел пробел пробел. this is, however, still better than in 14.0.3, in my opinion. A good work-around for this issue is to add a profile for the Ukrainian voice and slow its speech rate, should you need to.

In terms of punctuation, I do not have any issues with it, although it will read each piece of punctuation in English, for example, здравствуйте period. That means Hello, should you need or want to know. :)

Sorry for such a long comment, and I hope this could be of help to a person who uses their computer with VoiceOver in Russian. I am also sorry about the use of so many Cyrillic characters and hope that this does not cause other issues.

@Tobias thanks for such a detailed comment. Glad there's something's being done about improving pronunciation in another languages. For now, comparing Monterey and Ventura, the most obvious is VO reading notifications and emails containing both Cyrillic and Latin letters with just English voice instead of switching between voices, or doing it inconsistently, particularly when moving through the emails list. But I'll also try Russian Siri voices. And in macOS 13.6 VO can switch to, as it struck me, Polish voice when reading Cyrillic letters.
As for the punctuation, the problem seems to have corrected itself and VO ignores periods and comas with Milena as per my custom punctuation settings :)

I meant to reply at the time, but firstly thank you so much for sharing the script. Is it an AppleScript?

I tried to get it working but no success so far. I think the spacing got mangled when I copy/pasted it. I copied it into Script Editor and ran it, but it just speaks the contents of the script which I'm guessing means I've got something wrong. Other than comments, are there 3 lines starting say, tell and tell?

I'll try some more when I get a few mins free. (Which I might have if I stop whinging on these forums about my Mac of course!). Looks like it will be useful though.

I made a new thread where I posted instructions. Have a peak.
https://applevis.com/forum/macos-mac-apps/attention-simple-voiceover-reboot-applescript

I very rarely use Text Edit, but I gave it a go when I was painstakingly trying to get my diagnostics logs to Apple. (This reminds me why my bug reports often go cold at this point as it's taken me well over an hour just on this one issue, anyway I digress again..)

I've finding in Text Edit I will be typing away and randomly VoiceOver stops speaking my characters. If I vo+right then vo+left it seems to indicate I am in a text area, but I can't get it to respond. Restarting VO fixes it but it's yet another annoying thing. It's possible Text Edit has always done this. Note to self: never use Text Edit if this is how it works.

I did also notice that VoiceOver was getting stuck on a forum page which I don't think is normal. Someone had put a lobster emoticon in front of the page title and I couldn't get past it. All I heard was "lobster lobster lobster lobster lobster" and I just thought... how much did I spend for this? It would have been funny if it wasn't so unbelievably annoying.

Hello,
This issue does not just happen in Text Edit. I often have it in Mail, WhatsApp, Signal, Messages, when I am typing longer passages of text. Often, pressing command tab out of the app, then going back in, fixes this, but it is still a very confusing and annoying bug. MacOS 14.1, which releases next week, might sort this out, as I haven't had the issue as much recently.

Hi again everyone. Subject is pretty accurate. I've never seen this before, but I cannot seem to find the setting to toggle word/spelling prediction off. This only seems to be the case in Mail, as I haven't experienced it elsewhere thus far. But I will be typing away, and VoiceOver keeps coming up with predictions even when I don't want/need them. I realize this may be helpful for some, and I fully agree. However, to have it on by default can get rather annoying. In addition, Mail seems to now have an odd behavior of sometimes ignoring right arrow-key presses. This doesn't seem to happen that much though.

Hello,
VoiceOver speaking text predictions is mostly normal while they are enabled. To disable them go to system settings --> Keyboard, then select "Edit" under Text Input. Here, select all input sources and there you will find a switch for predictive. Turn this off.

Maybe I'm the only one stupid and careless enough to do this, but if you go to keyboard settings and are happily pressing 6 on the numpad to move through all the controls and you're not really paying close attention, then it's very easy to accidentally set 6 to be the shortcut for dictation. This is because when the box has focus it just accepts anything that happens to be pressed.

I first did this a year or so ago and it took me forever to figure out why I could hear a weird ping sound when seemingly moving around normally with VoiceOver.

MacOS 14.1, iOS 17.1 and WatchOS 10.1 are likely to be released this week, and there is a bug with VoiceOVer that involves the use of Siri voices. If you use your device in multiple languages and have multiple language profiles configured to use Siri voices, they may delete themselves. It is best here to describe my own situation:
I had my mac, iPhone and watch configured with five languages: English, German, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian (The last two were only on my mac.) English used Daniel, German used Siri voice 1, Russian also used Siri voice 1, Spanish used Jorge and Ukrainian used Lesya, which is the only available voice.
After my devices charged over night, I would open them the next day to find that the Siri voices had been deleted, and Daniel Compact was set as the default voice for all languages that had previously used Siri voices. This meant that I had to download these voices every day, because I am too much of a fuss pot and do not like the other voices for Russian, for example.

The only solution I could find, other than just stopping using Siri voices altogether, is to set a Siri voice as your default in VoiceOver. For example, I am now using Australian siri voice 1 as my default.

As a side note, if you use Siri in a different language, that voice will not delete itself, even if your default voice is something different. For example, for a brief period my Siri was set to German, and even with Daniel set as my English voice, the German Siri voice remained, so only the Russian one would be deleted.

Apple have only just been made aware of this by me, as I could not entirely work out whether it was just an issue on my end.

Sorry for such a long comment, and I hope that this might be helpful to somebody out there.