I've noticed an annoying quirk in VoiceOver for Mac (Monterey)
If I have a long camel cased word, then VoiceOver will spell it out for me instead of pronouncing it as words.
For example, VoiceOver reads out OneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSeven as if it had spaces between the words. However, if I add the word Eight onto the end, so OneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEight, then VoiceOver reads "capital O n e capital T double u o" etc. Which is really annoying me as we have a load of yaml files that does this a lot.
Does anyone know if there is a way to change this behaviour? I'm not sure if it's a bug?
Comments
This issue is voice-dependent.
Try switching your voice. I see it with Alison, which I use nearly all the time, but not with Alex.
The behavior appears with any sufficiently long word, not just camel-cased words. Here is the infamously long city in Wales, for example: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll.
The behavior existed prior to Monterey. I submitted it to accessibility@apple.com ages ago. They acknowledged it was a problem, but there has been no improvement.
Thanks
Thanks for that. I am using Kate Compact on my Mac, but I later read out my post on my iPhone using one of the Siri voices and it did the same. I might have a mess around later and see if I can find any that handle it better. I'll also email Apple. It does make editing yaml impossibly slow.
All voices with this issue
On Mac, here are all the voices that exhibit this issue: Alison, Ava, Daniel, Karen, Nicky, Samantha, Susan, and all the SIRI Voices. And here are the voices that pronounce long words normally: Alex, Fiona, Moira, Rishi, Tessa, Veena.
You're right, it's on the iPhone too. I just tried it and reproduced the problem with the Samantha voice.
There's also an issue with the word "lax". Some voices insist upon spelling it out as if it's the name of the airport in Los Angeles, others pronounce it correctly. Interestingly, the voices that have this issue are different from the voices that spell out long words.
It's quite a head-scratcher.
Lax
Yeah that is weird, but I bet you are right that it's to do with the airport. Maybe American voices are trying to be clever? I'm guessing that one might be fixable with pronunciations.
RE:L Lax
I do believe that you can fix this annoying issue with Pronunciations. If you want it to pronounce the word in all caps then enter it as such, and in lower case lax, then enter another entry for this one.
Do you mean entering in each…
Do you mean entering in each individual word? This would fix something like "lax" or the occasional word that appears a lot, but I've got a lot of yaml files with this problem and am not sure I want to add each one in there.
I have a similar but entirely unrelated problem with python package names as they are usually words thrown together with no spaces and VoiceOver completely mispronounces them. This one might be a matter of just getting used to it but often I have no idea what it's trying to tell me. I'm guessing that one would be a lot harder to fix.
Re: ax
Yes, I could fix the pronunciation of lax with a dictionary entry. I guess I haven't done this because I'd sort of like to know when the bug gets fixed. I reported it ages ago, along with several other Alison pronunciation problems.
RE: Do you mean entering in each…
I am unfamiliar with this yaml file type, but yes, adding two Pronunciation Dictionary entries should resolve it, assuming they are being read by VO.
Another Alison issue
I know this thread is about VoiceOver spelling out really long words. I'm sorry to take the thread even further off topic, but I just found another issue with the Alison voice that I thought was worth mentioning.
Change your VoiceOver voice to Alison, then compare pronunciation of the words tornado and Tornado. Not sure why capitalizing the word would change its pronunciation, unless VoiceOver thinks it's a place name / proper noun. But other voices, such as Alex, pronounce tornado the same, capitalized or not, and I feel that's an inconsistency that should be addressed in a future release.