Voiceover loses focus after resuming from sleep or waking display

By Voracious P. Brain, 13 November, 2021

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I think this might be an M1-specific issue in conjunction with Monterey. First, as of buying this M1 running Big Sir, I could not change the "turn display off after" slider in the Battery system preferences panel. Although I can move the slider, navigating away from and back to the panel returns it to two minutes. That's actually only the background for the new Monterey issue I'm experiencing.
After the display turns off and resumes, whether that's from 2 minutes of inactivity or resuming from sleep, text edit fields where my focus was now are no longer responsive. I can VO-arrow away from the text area and back to it, interact with it, and still VO will not read the field or enter text in it. Usually, alt-tabbing away from the text editor and back again resolves the issue, but sometimes I've had to restart VoiceOver, and I've even had the entire computer seem to lock up, unable to get VO responsive again.
Since this happens after only two minutes of inactivity on my system, my shiny Mac is basically unfit for the simplest task of all: entering plain text.
Others experiencing one or both of these issues?
Also, when I need to interact with a security dialog to "press the lock to make changes" to a system control panel screen, the password field is not announced at all until I VO-arrow away from and back to it. I have a hunch this is a related issue, since it also concerns VO dropping focus.

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Comments

By Roland on Sunday, November 28, 2021 - 23:45

Hi, I can confirm exactly the same bug on an Intel based Mac Mini with Monterey installed.
CMD+TAB-ing away from the focussed window and then back to it might help.
In addition I don't get any feedback when typing my password after waking up the machine from sleep.

/Roland

By Kevin Shaw on Sunday, November 28, 2021 - 23:45

I've got the same issue with Pages and Messages on Monterey running on Intel. I've had to quit and relaunch VO a couple of times for the focus issue to be cleared. Other times, I've had to quit and relaunch the offending apps. I will attempt to come up with some steps to repeat this and report to accessibility@apple.com. Please do the same if you are experiencing the same.

By Cobbler on Sunday, November 28, 2021 - 23:45

I routinely find that the text composition window of MultiMarkdown Composer is inaccessible after waking my Mac, and that only turning VoiceOver off and back on again resolves this.

There had been no hint of this issue prior to Monterey.

Sigh

By Kevin Shaw on Sunday, November 28, 2021 - 23:45

I reported this issue to Apple—specifically, not being able to arrow up and down in Mail after wake. I received the following response.

Hello Kevin,

Thank you for your email and for the detailed steps you provided to reproduce this issue.

We have tested this on our side using multiple Macs and different versions of Monterey and encountered this same behavior. We found that VoiceOver remains enabled, but provides no volume. Turning VO off and back on seems to enable it properly again after waking up from sleep. However, we have sent up our findings along with your feedback to our engineering team for immediate investigation.

Sincerely,

Apple Accessibility

Looks like they've found other issues as well. Hope this gets resolved in the next .release.