VoiceOver occasionally skips over initial words in a phrase

I reproduced this issue while reviewing application keyboard shortcuts. As I arrowed up and down through the table, VoiceOver announced "Ms" when it should have said "Cell two items", so it effectively chopped off the first two words, and the first three letters of the third word. Again, VoiceOver announced it correctly after navigating back to re-read.

I thought I was going mad until I read this post that highlighted a similar issue I am having with the DJay app on MacOs.

When scrolling down a list of songs in a playlist, Voiceover will randomly skip over the first few words of the titles.
I believe that these titles are in a table if that helps.

Again, not entirely sure if there's any reason or pattern to when or why this happens, but does seem to be after scrolling down for a while, rarely happens on the first few items in the list.

I think there's a chance you might encounter this bug regardless of the app you're using. I've encountered it with both Finder and MS Word today. It's like one block of text out of every thousand chunks that VO speaks, VO will skip over the initial words or parts of words in that chunk of text.

This is a tough one to reproduce, but I hope Apple takes the time to investigate and eliminate it.

No change with the release of 15.3. It's still an issue.

I had maybe the same or a similar bug in 15.1 where on applevis forums navigating right would skip about 3 paragraphs at once but those would be visible leftward which has been fixed earlier in the 15.3 beta cycle.

I have the same bug on ios

After several hours on 15.4, I haven't encountered it. Let's keep watching.

This is encouraging. I'll be watching this space.

This issue appears to still be present in MacOS 15.4. I also experienced it in iOS 18.4.