Text checker isn't working, Apple being no help.

By glassheart, 25 October, 2022

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

OK, I'm having a very strange problem with Ventura and the new Text Checker functionality of Voiceover.

I have enabled keyboard commander, and have the commander modifier set to my right option key, as it is by default behavior.

So, I go into Text Edit, we'll just say for example, and I type the following line of text:

Helo my name iz chris and i m forty yearz old.

Obviously, I purposefully mangled that to smithereens as I wanted to see the text checker in action tell me about my issues.

So, I interacted with the text as the Voiceover guide states to first do. I then made certain that I was at the top of my document with command+up arrow. Then, I issued the text checker keyboard commander which again is with my right option key, so I therefore hit Right Option+D, as in delta.

All I heard is a bwonk tone telling me it couldn't find anything. That's obviously completely false, as if you look again above at what I typed, you'll see it was pretty badly written both from a spelling as well as gramatical perspective.

I tried selecting all text with command+A, but that didn't help.

I went to the menu bar and made sure check spelling while typing was checked, and it is. Don't know if that is rellavent, but figured I'd do it anyway just in case, as normally I have that disabled. Again though, it didn't make any difference.

Just in case it's looking for the red squiggly line or green squiggly line for spelling, red, or grammar, green, I made sure my OS theme was set to lite, and that invert colors was disabled, which both were indeed disabled/on lite theme already.

If at the top of the document, I hit Command+semi colon, it definitely finds all of the spelling errors, so it definitely sees that something is wrong with my text over all; just not with the new text checker.

In Mail, I'm having identically the same problem when composing, forwarding, or replying to messages.

In Notes, same thing.

In Messages same thing.

In Safari and Chrome both, same thing.

Even in MS Edge, same thing.

I've restarted Voiceover to no avale.

I've backed up my Voiceover settings so they could be reimported after this test, but I then reset literally all settings in Voiceover to defaults, then tried. Same issue. Obviously after that failed attempt, I reimported my settings I'd backed up.

Even though we're only one day in of the official public Ventura release, I went to software update and made sure things were still totally up to date, and they are as I suspected.

I rebooted, but it did no good.

I created a brand fresh new user account, and that didn't help, so then deleted that test account which BTW did have administrator access.

I called Apple, and they sent me a link to the Ventura user guide for Voiceover, and also sent me a link to a KB article on what new Voiceover commands are in Ventura, but neither of those really gave me any help. They basically both just told me things I already knew.

When I asked them to push an FYI to the engineers, they told me engineers won't probably do much with this, as "It's working as expected" for them, and they can't reproduce the issue, so if they can't reproduce it there on their end, their FYI would be rejected making it, their words not mine, "pointless to send in the first place."

I had about 3 accessibility senior advisors all tell me this exact same sob story. One even insisted I was probably having these buggy issues because I was on either the dev channel beta build, or the public channel beta. When I told them absolutely not, this is the official build that came out yesterday to everyone, they kept insisting that if it was broken on my end, they couldn't reproduce, therefore the only logical thing was I am on the beta.

I finally insisted they did a screen share with me, which they happily obliged to doing. Once they did, I went into "About this Mac", and when they saw it *was* the official release, and indeed *isn't* the beta, they just very what sounded sarcasticly were like, "Oh, sorry, sir." I was like, OK, first off, I'm not a sir, thank you very much. I'm Mix. Second of all, you could be a bit more empathetic. Seriously?

So yeah. I don't want to necessarily bash Apple here, but come on... This is down right ridiculous! I just wanna know if this really is broken, or if not, then what in the bloody hell am I doing wrong? As you can see, I've practically tried pretty much every dad gum thing under the freaking son! I literally can't think of anything I've not tried. Yeah, I know, reformat and reinstall/partition my drive. Shoo'oo'oor. Only kidding, but in all seriousness, yeah... I don't know what's left to do.

Any help is hugely appreciated, as I do want to start getting more into writing documents and formatting them, etcetera with my mac, so this would be a very welcomed feature, if the blasted thing actually half ass worked.

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Comments

By PaulMartz on Thursday, October 27, 2022 - 04:39

I copied and pasted your text into Textedit, pressed right-olption+D, and it flagged both the non-capitalization of "chris" as well as "yearz" with a Z, but did not catch "iz".

BTW, this was the first time I've seen text checker catch a mis-capitalization, so thanks for posting it.

I'm not sure why your system's text checker isn't working. It seems like Apple would be able to take a system snapshot from your computer so they can investigate further.

By glassheart on Thursday, October 27, 2022 - 04:39

OK, so, Apple got back with me about this.

I have no clue what this command does aside the sudo part of it, but they had me go into Terminal, and there was some command we ran which I don't remember to save my life, but after we ran it and rebooted, the text checker now seems to be coming up like it should. Man that was freaking weird!

Anyway, now I'm having a bigger issue though.

Let's go back to the example in my initial post. According to the Voiceover user guide for Ventura, you're supposed to be able to do option+D, then when it opens the checker, left and right arrows should move you by category like mis-spell, white space, capitalization, etcetera.

Oddly though, when I hit just my plain left and right arrow keys, not VO+left or right, I'm saying literally just left or right arrows, Voiceover is dingging at me, and doing nothing else. No speech feedback, nothing.

I tried hitting a modifier key as discussed in the bugs found in Ventura Applevis article, but that didn't help, and I tried option, command, shift, control, nothing worked.

Also, Apple told me that the checker window showed multiple spelling errors, but when I try up and down arrowing, it just simply shows nothing more than the first problematic error it found. It says the whole word, spells it, then tells me the whole sentence it's in.

Hitting return is moving me to the word with my insertion point in the document right at the beginning of the word in question, but that just returns me to the actual document hitting return, and doesn't actually leave the checker flyout on the screen. That might be normal though, I don't know. But the bottom line is, I can't move between the categories nor can I seem to move between problems within the category. I tried stopping and starting interaction, but both also just ding at me. VO+up, down, left, or right ding as well but nothing further.

Also, I thought when the checker was up, you could hit VO+Shift+M on one of the problems, and it would give you a choice of replacements, but no. VO+shift+M also is dingging at me.

Apple Accessibility again doesn't seem to much have a clue. They told me, this is so new of a feature that no one's been trained on it, nor has anyone been trained yet at all period on accessibility with Ventura. I find that a bit hard to believe, but yeah, ok. Whatever.

Actually, the last guy I spoke with told me that they haven't even updated any of the advisors to Ventura, so there's no way they can in house test things.

I mean, seriously? You're gonna release an OS, yet not train your agents on how to help customers with it, and further aren't even going to keep your agents up to date with things? Where is the logic to this approach, as I'm clearly missing something here, or I'm just profoundly stupid, one of the two.

It really really would be nice if someone could make an audio demo guide on using Text Checker and step by step show how it's done, as clearly I must not know what I'm doing. You'd think though, surely I can't be this dumb/Voiceover illiterate! If a guide in audio specifically already does exist, can I please have a link to it?

Otherwise, could someone make one for me and then post the link to it? It really would help.

By Devin Prater on Thursday, October 27, 2022 - 04:39

If you can recall that command, or find it with Up arrow in termianl, that would be nice to know.