The New Features, Changes, Improvements, and Bugs in macOS 13 Ventura for Blind and Low Vision Users

I've been testing Ventura pretty extensively since the first beta, and over all I think it's a very solid release, VoiceOver got a few features that people wanted for a long time and also a few bugs were fixed.

By far the biggest change is that it appears the speech code went through a rewrite, and in general every voice whether it's Alex, Vocalizer, the Siri voices or Eloquence is very snappy. Issues with speech talking over itself have also largely been addressed and this is most pronounced if you use the Siri Voices. There are a couple of new bugs related to this though, which are thankfully not very serious but should be kept in mind.

• If you use Eloquence, setting the pitch to any other value than 50% will cause anything where VoiceOver should change pitch to stop working. So that's things like raising pitch for capitals or lowering it when deleting text or when it speaks the column headers or placeholder text in edit fields in a lower pitch. This works fine with other voices or if Eloquence's pitch is kept at 50.
• Still on the topic of Eloquence, unlike in iOS, Mac Eloquence doesn't seem to split up mixed case strings, which makes reading source code or long hashtags much harder.
• What doesn't work at all in any voice now is the intonation control which also has no effect.
• What also doesn't work anymore is the additional voice options, so IE if you set your "type" or "text attributes" voice to be anything other than default the setting is just ignored. Apple marked this issue as potential fix identified a few betas ago but it still made it into the final release.
• The advanced language switching which was introduced in Mac OS Monterey was slightly broken in Ventura. It still works fine for the most part if you use the VoiceOver cursor to navigate, but if you move with the keyboard focus instead (IE down the file list in finder) then it just reads everything in the system language. This one was partially addressed during the beta cycle but not entirely fixed.

Also, while I'm on the topic of things that so far are a bit disappointing, the way the option to indicate indentation levels with sound has been implemented also still needs refinement to be useful. While the sound was considerably improved during the beta from its first iteration, unlike the way this works in NVDA on Windows speech waits for the sound to finish playing before it reads the indented line. THis takes about half a second and you end up losing any benefit the feature may have brought. If this is changed to speak the line while the sound is playing or not wait so long, this will be an amazing addition and for the moment my IndentBeeper utility and the options to speak the indent levels work well.

Now for some other positive changes, a long standing bug with the VO-F find feature has been fixed allowing you to enter characters that require the option key. This is probably something people that only use English haven't ran into but for Polish for instance this is a huge fix that people have been asking for a very long time. Something else that has been greatly improved is the Books app, which you can now comfortably use to read through a book. Whether you just move through the text with the VO keys, do a say all or even use the table of contents feature the VoiceOver cursor is moved to the correct spot and will turn pages while a say all is in progress.

Web browsing performance in general also appears to have improved in Safari, some work has happened in the background to separate processing of accessibility requests from the rest of the browser and this can sometimes make an improvement on very large sites. One regression with web browsing is that quick navigation keys stopped working in Firefox, though this is an issue that appears to be specific just to that browser and should hopefully be addressed by Mozilla soon. Quick navigation keys in Safari, as well as Chrome and Electron based apps still work totally fine. I've also not had any major issues in other third party apps.

In summary I'd absolutely recommend this release, even if you're not a fan of Eloquence there's still a lot to like here. I really hope Apple continues to address user feedback, I feel that this release has been a pretty big step forward in that regard even if it's not perfect.

This is just a note to let those of you who are using the Ventura developer or public beta know that you will not be able to use VO to remove the profile if you no longer wish to receive betas. The link to "learn more" about installing betas which you'll need to click on in order to return to regular update settings is part of an element which contains text, so clicking on the link, either with the keyboard or the trackpad, results in the VO sound meaning that there is nothing in the cursor being played. You will need sighted assistance if you wish to remove the profile as it seems to require the use of the mouse.

I find it odd that removing the beta isn't accessible. Could one do it via v o o c r? Either way I always beta test on a separate partition so I don't have to worry about this, but for those who installed the beta on their primary partition, try v o o c r, that might work.

Yes, I definitely love the improved experience in the Books app.

First thing I noticed was that I couldn't login with VoiceOver enabled. I sometimes have problems getting the password box to have focus anyway, but I had real difficulty. After a few attempts I managed to get VoiceOver off and then could get in.

I might be wrong, but I am sure that Karen is now speaking a bit faster than before.

One other thing I noticed - in PyCharm I can have notifications spoken out. I was never sure how to customise the voice and speed of it but today it is speaking with the voice and rate I have configured under Accessibility Spoken Content. Maybe before it just didn't like having Siri voice selected, but it now seems happy with it.

I'm noticing a few other monitor things that might be related to the update.

In Mail, VO+J doesn't seem to jump to the mailbox list any more. It just bounces between message and message list.

In PyCharm, it's started repeating text in the project window. E.g. E.g. for "tests" it might say "tests text tests". Might be me, I was in the verbosity options but don't think I changed anything and can't find any likely culprits.

One other thing, in the VoiceOver Utility custom verbosity table, it is not reading out the table headings. Maybe it never did. Web tables seem to work as before.

Can't say for sure that any of the above is Ventura's fault or not. Macos VoiceOver is so random anyway.

Hi Folks:

Using an M1 Mac Mini and Ventura, I am unable to open any app from the applications menu using the VO Spacebar.

Thanks.

I was really excited about the new indentation options, but I'm a little worried that they are going to turn out to be as buggy as everything else.

I'm wondering if maybe they don't work if you have a custom activity. I have one for Coding and it doesn't respect my custom punctuation (as per Monterey) and I don't get the indentation tone. But if I turn indentation on by default then it does work.

Does anyone else use activities? I'm beginning to think I'll need to turn everything on its head - change the default activity with all my coding settings and then add a new activity with default settings that I just apply to every other app.

So far I've not noticed any bug fixes - VoiceOver is still as random and frustrating to use as ever. The only thing I like is keyboard commander and D to check for text errors. That seems like it might be pretty useful.

But still seems to be riddled with focus issues. Editing text is still a horrible experience. I can't say I'm feeling any less annoyed with my Mac after installing it.

I just updated last night to OS Ventura. I have yet to explore everything, but I'm currently using Eddie and he is working pretty well considering Eloquence is brand-new on Apple products. I still wonder how this all came to be, but that is probably a whole topic inandof itself which I'm hoping gets covered somewhere eventually. But anyway, I've already found a couple minor quirks but I'm sure they will be ironed out as time goes by.

Under Ventura I am running into a problem navigating large text files in TextEdit. These files contain several thousand lines of plain text, over a megabyte in size. Under Monterey I had absolutely no problems in these files, but in Ventura VoiceOver chokes pretty badly.

For example, pressing Command-Down arrow to jump to the end of the file used to be instantaneous, but now it takes over a minute for VoiceOver to resume speaking after pressing this keystroke. It goes completely silent, not even telling me that the app is busy or not responding.

Similar problems happen when I try to search for a piece of text within the file. If the text I'm searching for is near the beginning of the file (within the first few hundred lines), then everything is fine. If it's towards the middle, VoiceOver will find and move to the correct place, but it takes a long time to get any speech feedback after the move, similar to when I jump to the end as described above. If the text I'm searching for is closer to the end of the document, VoiceOver fails to find the text altogether, and it also becomes unresponsive for well over a minute before finally starting to speak again.

While VoiceOver is giving me the silent treatment, I can use Command-Tab to switch to another app, after which VoiceOver starts speaking again. Switching back to TextEdit, however, causes VO to go silent again.

Again, this behavior is completely new in Ventura. I was working with the same files under Monterey without any issues whatsoever. Navigating to the bottom of the file used to be instantaneous, and searching for text within the file gave me results within a second or two, which is perfectly reasonable. I am running an M1 iMac with 16GB of memory, which is more than enough for this use case. This behavior change is completely wrecking my workflow, and unless I can find a workaround, I may be forced to downgrade, which I really don't want to do because I'm otherwise enjoying the enhanced VoiceOver experience.

Hi,

I have just updated to MacOS Ventura yesterday, and my observations are good. I'm using flow and I have no issues with my preferred voice. Eloquence is very responsive on MacOS. I'm glad apple was able to port the eloquence voices into MacOS. not sure how that came to be, but I'm sure it'll be explained in minor detail later. I have also noticed that Samantha is the systemwide voice when going into recovery mode, or at the login screen. I'm happy for that, because in previous versions of MacOS, Alex was your preferred system voice by default.

It's interesting reading all these reports. I'm glad Apple Books has improved, but what about Safari? Has Safari busy busy busy been resolved for good? How easy is it to read tagged PDF files in Preview? It's been a mess since the half-baked support added in High Sierra. I wonder how reliably the new word processing features actually work? Has Apple improved Pages so it's easier to jump by headings and links? Last I checked it's a bit of a mess.

I want to like the Mac, I really do. I had to cool off after getting extremely upset concerning the VoiceOver mouse issue which I've been told has been fixed in Ventura. That remains to be seen. I'll be asking Apple Accessibility about this when the new M2 Mac Mini ships with Ventura, and hopefully they give me accurate information.

Even if there are issues, I hope they can be worked out with subsequent updates. Hopefully this is the start to Apple taking customer feedback seriously like they should have been doing all along.

Did you try using vo-shift-m or just pressing the return key to open apps in the app folder in finder?

I have learned from experience to postpone upgrading for as long as eleven months because of a bad experience I had with Big Sur, so I haven't yet upgraded from Monterey. I didn't even upgrade to Monterey until this past June or July because of that bad experience.

Return causes the filename to be selected in case someone wanted to name it something different. I'm holding off on upgrading seeing as how i got my butt in the fire for deciding to go for IOS 16 and they have royally screwed up alex, it's poppy and choppy sometimes, also the siri American voice 4 sounds no different than voice two. My fault for thinking they knew what they were doing.

Siri voices are strangely lower in terms of quality in comparison to previous MacOS releases.

Speed of Nicky’s Siri voice can not be adjusted.

A common mistake I make when writing is to write two separate, properly capitalized sentences, then later join them as two clauses with a conjunction and totally forget to uncapitalized the first letter of the second clause. As a blind user, there is no effective way to find such mis-capitalization. The Microsoft Word spell checker will catch it, but Apple's spell checker does not. I discussed this with Apple accessibility, and they agreed to enter it as a feature request.

I was hoping the ventura text checker would support finding miscapitalized words. Unfortunately it fails to do so, as reported in the body of this post and confirmed with my own experimentation.

The keyboard commander announcement of time, battery, and signal strength is a great addition. Well done.

As for the overhaul of voices, I'll have to spend some time at a slower speaking rate and grow accustomed to these changes. The Allison voice I loved so much has become extremely difficult to understand. I've switched to Samantha, but this voice is very nasal and the pitch change for capitals is almost impossible to distinguish from the pitch used for lower case.

I updated to Ventura and I like this update. But pitch changing is missing for all voices. And I also have some problems with Safari when I use a web application, such as WhatsApp, Safari gets stuck for a few seconds and after that it gets back. I don't like eloquence so much, I prefer natural voices, but it is nice to have. VoiceOver seems more responsive and it is a bit faster than in Monterey. It still has bugs, but I can live with them until apple will do something.

Whenever a app adds login items, you get a notification. And the trouble is, its not just once you get this notification. Its every single time. For instadce, for those of you who use vmware fusion, every time you launch it, you get the following notification,
Vmware added items that can run in the background, you can manage this in system settings. This happens every time you launch the app, and its annoying as all hell. I did report the but to apple, multiple times, and nothing. I'm sure they're working on a fix, but damn this bug is annoying as heck. I'm hoping it gets fixed soon because its driving me crazy. Other than that, its a really solid update and i'm liking it a lot.

For anyone who's curious, here's Apple's list of changes for VoiceOver in Ventura.
https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/whats-new-in-voiceover-vo15627/mac

Normally, when VoiceOver reads message body text and comes across a link, it should pause slightly and say the word link, then read the link text. After upgrading to Ventura, it seems to intermittently read links as normal text.

So, I'm a professional audio engineer. There's a really nasty bug with PT 2022.9 which is the most recent version of ProTools. Basically in a nutshell, if you're in the mix window, or the edit window, doesn't matter, if you have multiple tracks in your session, and the track list is shown, if you then go interact with the track list table, it used to be, VO+spacing on a track would toggle its state from either being selected or not selected.

Since updating to Ventura, this is really acting very wonky. Even though I have Voiceover navigation sounds enabled globally, hitting VO+Space doesn't make the little click sound like you'd normally hear when activating items. But worse, all VO+space does on the currently focused track when interacting with the track list table is to select the one, and one only individual track under the Voiceover cursor. Hitting it again does absolutely nothing.

Let's say now there were 2 tracks, we'll just call them for easability, track1, and track2. If track one was selected, then I move down to track2, then VO+Space, what should happen is, now, track 1 and! track 2 would both be selected. What actually however happens as said a second ago is, track 1 would get unselected, and track 2 would gain selection all by itself individually. And before anyone asks, what about just shift up and down arrowing, no. Absolutely not! That's not how ProTools even worked previously; it's a lot more specific/suffisticated than that. This doesn't work exactly like a regular table, so please don't assume if you're unfamiliar with how PT does things to start with.

To be fair, I know Avid hasn't officially certified that ProTools is supported on Ventura. So, this very very likely is a compatibility issue, but I wanted to at least make folks aware of it, just in case anyone else out there using ProTools decides they wanna take the plunge. There are a few work arounds, but they're annoying as hell, at best.

One thing that works consistently is that you can hold down the command key then physically click your mouse trackpad thereby doing a command+click. That will actually toggle on or off selection of a track.

So in theory, you could select track1, then move down in the track list table to track2, route your mouse with VO+Command+F5, then command+Click. Now, both track 1 and 2 would both be selected. This shouldn't however be necessary. VO+spacing should do the trick, provided things were working correctly, which obviously, they're not.

Also, CTRL+Semi Colon and CTRL+P do work for moving the selection up or down a track at a time individually while unselecting the currently selected track. And yes, adding the shift key to those commands will indeed still work by just adding to the selection or removing. So for instance, if track 1 was selected only, then you hit CTRL+Shift+Semi Colon, that would move down to track 2 and select it, while also maintaining keeping track 1 also selected.

So yeah, there are work arounds, don't get me wrong. It's not a total dealbreaker for me, but it is definitely incredibly annoying, but again to be fair, it's probably my own damn falt for updating my production machine knowing well that PT wasn't officially yet supported. I do have a time machine backup, but I don't think it's worth me downgrading just for this. That's like killing a roach with a sledge hammer.

If anyone knows any easier work arounds to this for the time being, I'd really be curious. I don't want this post entry turning into a PT discussion, so I'm trying to tie this back to Ventura with Voiceover not behaving correctly, but sometimes, with OS updates, bugs can and probably will crop up in 3rd party apps. I know Avid will most likely sooner or later fix this, but just wanted to mention it in case anyone else has seen this and like me, was like, what the fart is going on here, and why? I really really do suspect it's a Ventura thing with compatibility, as this never seemed to happen in Monterey.

So, I'd rather protect the privacy of the one who told me about this, so therefore I won't mention their name, but someone who knows ProTools probably better than most blind people, you probably can guess who if you really think about it hard enough, got back with me and told me that ProTools works way differently in Ventura. It's not a bug, but what I described is apparently the way it should have worked all along. Actually being able to do as I expected was an unusual oddity we've had for years. So actually the correct way now is Command+clicking as I said selects tracks noncontiguously, shift clicking does so contiguously, or your CTRL+semi colon and CTRL+P along with the shift key also as stated earlier works. The old way of doing it though is gone, and probably won't return most likely. It's now just getting used to the new way. If that's too hard though, you also can do VO+Command+Space on the track of choice to bring up the actions menu, and then go to press, and that will also toggle its selection status. So, that way isn't so bad actually. I can definitely live with that. So just wanted to put this up before anyone started getting wrong info. This wasn't actually a bug after all, so I need to correct myself, as I do not wish to spread inaccurate information on Applevis if I can at all help it. In fact, this message along with the other one I posted before this can welcomely be removed by an admin if they'd like to do so. They have permission. I tried, but it's not working for some reason. Anyway guys, I apologize profusely for the confusion. This probably wasn't even the best place to post it in this thread, but I really wasn't thinking earlier, so forgive me greatly!

Now I've had a chance to play with it...

Firstly, as I said before, if you enable it in an activity thethen it doesn't seem to work. It seems to only work if enabled for the default. So I've left it there for now.

Secondly, to work around the lack of this feature before I had set up substitutions for spaces to be read as "in one", "in two" etc. These ha to be removed for it to work.

But now it is working, it's rather a nice sound - moving up and down my code is almost musical. But I would agree with the above poster that it's really slow to start reading the text after it's played the sound. I hope this can be improved or it will be quite annoying.

I'm seeing some very odd behavior with the Spelling and Grammar dialog. In Safari, right now, while entering this text into the AppleVis add new comment text field, if I press Command+Shift+Semicolon, I hear VoiceOver say "Show spelling and grammar, Safari has new window". But VO focus is still in my text field, and there is apparently no way to move focus to the spell checker dialog. Tab won't move focus into it, and VO+F2 twice does not list a new window.

I tested with Scrivener, and the spell checker behaved normally.

I found slightly different behavior with the Mail app. I opened a new message and started writing the message body. I pressed Command+Shift+semicolon and experienced the same behavior as with Safari. However, VO+F2 twice did show the Spelling and Grammar dialog, and I could move focus to it using that method.

While fiddling with Spelling and Grammar in the Mail app for my previous post, I encountered another issue.

With the Mail app set to open messages in separate windows, Command+accent no longer switches between windows. The only way to move focus between Mail app windows is to use the window chooser, VO+F2 twice.

Well...I've had a bit more time to play around with this latest release and I'm very impressed at the new stuff which I've found. I'm sure I'll find the other new stuff sooner or later. However, I seem to recall some more voices that were supposed to be added such as Evan, Nathan and I believe a few others. I've looked and these ones aren't there for me. Not a show-stopper by any means but is this the case with anyone else? I just switched to Reed and he's sounding very good.

It seems that the text checker knows when you are not on a text field and correctly won't open in that case. But once you're in a text field, the text checker is unable to differentiate between text inside or outside the text field with focus.

Here's an example of this issue.

While viewing this web page in Safari, press right option+D to execute the text checker. You'll hear an error sound and the text checker will not open. That is correct behavior, in my opinion, because there is no editable text on the web page.

Now, move focus into one of the Add New Comment text fields, either the subject or the comment body field. Press right option+D to launch the text checker. It opens, and it contains many spelling errors, all for non-editable text. This seems wrong. It should only check text within the editable text field.

@PaulMartz - I've noticed this too. It does feel like the text checker is totally useless on web pages. Seems like it will be a great feature if that can be fixed though.

Since Spelling and Grammar is still present on the Edit munu, I'm going to assume Apple hasn't deprecated this feature. I mean, the Text Checker is purely for VO, right? Sighted people would still use Spelling and Grammar.

But I'm seeing a lot broken with Spelling and Grammar in Ventura.

If I have multiple documents open in Scrivener, prior to Ventura, Spelling and Grammar would only check text for the document window with focus. But with Ventura, Spelling and Grammar finds spelling mistakes in other Scrivener windows. This seems way wrong.

Also, I had totally mangled one word to the point where Spelling and Grammar had no suggestions. Prior to Ventura, I would simply put VO focus in the text field with the misspelled word and correct it. But with Ventura, I can no longer edit the misspelled word. I just get the VO error thunk sound for every keypress.

I've noticed some weird problems since upgrading to Ventura, although I don't know for sure that they are related.

In Safari, Chrome and Edge, I'd be able to use the up and down cursor keys to go up and down one line. I've enabled caret browsing in Chrome and Edge. Now, any cursor keys just seem to jump me to the top of the browser window. At least I think so, I tend to just get lost at that point. (And no I don't have quick nav on)

And when using Jira in Chrome (not tried in the others), using the dropdown lists seems really random as to whether they work. For example, I jump to the status of a ticket and click and sometimes I can use up/down to change status, sometimes it does something entirely different. Or changing sprint doesn't seem to work properly. As if using Jira wasn't hard enough already!

(Edit - just tried and it's the same in Safari. Could be that Jira has updated. Also noticed in Bitbucket)

Anyone else noticed anything weird like this?

I also like to use up and down arrow in Safari to read a line at a time, and found issues with this feature after upgrading to Ventura. It might be related to reader view mode, I honestly haven't investigated it much after finding a workaround.

My workaround: When I run into this issue, I open the VO find window with VO+F. Then hit escape. After that, the up and down arrow keys seems to respond again.

It's astounding that such a basic piece of functionality would break, and it confirms my long-standing suspicion that Apple has no automated regression test system.

The Google Drive keyboard shortcuts that allow use of Google Drive through web browsers seem to be non-functional with current Safari and VoiceOver.

For example, go to drive.google.com. Sign in, if you aren't already. Now press G followed by N. This should move focus to the sidebar. However, VoiceOver says nothing. Press G followed by L. This should move focus to the list of files and folders. Again, VoiceOver says nothing. Press J and K to move up and down through this list. Sometimes, VoiceOver announces the name of the file or folder. Other times, it simply says "List Box". In effect, Google Drive is now unusable with Safari and VoiceOver.

To see correct behavior, open Google Chrome and try G N, G L, J, and K again. You'll see that VoiceOver announces everything correctly and allows you to use Drive normally.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

If you use J and K to move through the list and hear "List Box", there is a workaround. Move the mouse to VO focus with VO+F5, and VO will properly announce the item.

Hello. It appears that my question about voices--and somebody else's--was answered in another forum topic on here. I found where to get the other voices that have been made available, but now the question becomes how to remove the ones which I don't want. I guess that will be revealed shortly. But the new American-English voices sound great in the samples.

I like the addition of this command for VO users. I notice that we now have 2 or 3 ways of checking date and time, as the previous command of right-option-T still works on my M1 Mac. Very nice!

I installed Ventura on my 2013 MacBook Air using OpenCore-Patcher and it runs okay. I've been playing with the Books app and it's great now! My only problem is navigating by headings and links. When I use VO Command l or VO Command h, VoiceOver doesn't seem to navigate reliably by these elements. They don't appear in the rotor either when pressing VO U. I assume this is a bug? I don't know if I want to report bugs to Apple, simply because my configuration is technically unsupported. Still, I'm pleased thus far. Ventura definitely seems more snappy, though I do notice some slowdowns in some places like Books which are probably due to my hardware.

Hi guys, I am using a Macbook pro 13 with TouchBar and Touch ID, and in the command for knowing the time and other information you told VO-Globe-7 in such a case. The problem is, I am actually able to recall where is the Globe key right now. Could someone help me on this?
I actually was using a third party script for knowing tame and date, but since it's now on the system I'd like to try this function and see if it works better than this script or not.
Bye!
Barbuz

No idea if this is Ventura related, or if Chrome has updated, but I'm really struggling to navigate some tables with VO in Chrome at the moment.

In particular, I'm noticing it in the AWS Management Console. It's often been a bit random (this is VoiceOver after all) but I seem to be completely unable to navigate the Cloudwatch logs tables any more. And I noticed for some other tables, I wasn't able to navigate below the scroll area. So I was trying to find CloudFormation events and I couldn't get past the first event until I zoomed out, then I could get a few more down. It's actually completely unusable for me these last couple of days.

I tried using Safari, but honestly couldn't even get my account selected. I ended up using NVDA on Windows. Even though I've no idea how to use it, it still seemed easier than trying to do it on my Mac.

I think I've also mentioned, but doing simple tasks in Jira has become unbearably frustrating the last week or two, both in Safari and Chrome.

It's hard to know when there are so many moving parts, but my Mac has been seriously annoying to use this week. Ventura hasn't fixed any bugs at all for me and definitely things have got worse for one reason or another.

I've also noticed in terminal that sometimes VoiceOver talks over itself which I've never had before either.

And one other thing, a couple of times I've had VoiceOver start talking from the top of a text area instead of where my cursor is. It's quite annoying when I'm trying to get myself in position. In fact it's constantly doing it now as I'm typing this. I'll move down a line and it starts from the top again. (This is Safari). I've had to bail out to a text editor to write it.

The only good thing about Ventura is the audible indents, and even that isn't quite there as it doesn't work with Activities and is so incredibly slow. It's about 2 seconds after the ping for it to start speaking the line.
I can gauge how well my Mac is working by how often my dog has had to leave the room in disgust at my foul language, and I've hardly seen her this week.

I've seen this only with the text fields on AppleVis.com. Are you seeing this elsewhere?

As for tables, web developers seem to have pounced on some new way to display tables that does not use the standard HTML

<

table> tag, and Apple, which generally promotes new technologies, seems to have lagged behind on this feature in Safari. Oh, I'm sure it works for sighted users ...

But here's what brought me to AppleVis today.

When you're composing an email to someone, and you decide you want to send them a web URL, how do you do it? Obviously, you open the website in Safari first. But then what? There is no "copy URL" option on the share menu.

For years, I could press command+L to go to the address bar, then command+C to copy. But this seems to have become unreliable, as if VoiceOver is no longer selecting the URL text as it once did. Command+A doesn't do the trick either. Seems like I have to Command+Right, then Command+Shift+Left, then finally Command+C. Anyone else seeing this? It's intermittent, but for me, it's happening a lot more since upgrading to Ventura.

I keep my Music library on a NAS drive. After upgrading to Ventura, under the Music app Settings window, Files settings, I see that the music library location has been reset to what I assume is the default location <home>/Music/Music/Media.. Strangely, the Music app is still finding my library on my NAS. That is, the default location in my home dir is essentially empty, and all my songs and albums display and play normally in the Mac Music app.

Yes, I've only noticed the reading from top thing on here.

As for HTML tables, it's annoying because it worked very recently. So I don't know if it's Ventura, or a Chrome update or a change to the markup but it now means I have to use Windows to do my job.

I'm guessing that markup is to blame in Jira when I can't interact with the table at all, but not so sure about AWS where I can get so far before dropping out.

I hate the fact that dodgy markup works visually. If browsers had just been strict in the day, then we would all be better off.

Hi, sorry for my delay but I actually expected a mail reporting that new comments arrived and since I did not get it I had only now the chance to visit the page again.
Thanks for trying to answer my question. The problem is, I got an M1 machine right now.
Bye!
Barbuz

I've been playing around with this, using the AppleVis text field as my playground. Here's what I've discovered. It's not entirely random.

When composing a post, we separate paragraphs with blank lines. I can type and type and type, creating content all the time without editing, and never experience this issue.

But once I've composed the post, I want to review it. The first thing I do is VO+Right to move focus out of the text field, then VO+Left back in, causing VoiceOver to read the entire contents of the text field. Note that moving focus out of the text field is required; I am unable to reproduce the issue until I move focus out of the text field, then back in.

After hearing the entire contents, invariably I want to move through a line at a time to make changes, and that's where I run into the problem. I press Command+Up to start at the top, and down arrow to review.

I only seem to experience this issue when I down arrow to the second line of a paragraph. For example:

1. With focus on the last line of the first paragraph, press down arrow. I will hear "New Line", which is correct, because I'm now on a blank line.
2. Press down arrow again. I will hear the first line of the second paragraph, which is again correct.
3. Press down arrow again. I expect to hear the second line of the second paragraph, but instead, VoiceOver begins reading from the start of the entire text field.

Here's a reflexive case: Start at the end and use up arrow. You'll trigger the issue in the second line up from the bottom of each paragraph.

Sorry for the excruciating detail. They say old programmers never die. LOL.

Small update on Jira - I finally got round to trying it with NVDA and it's behaving the same way, so it looks like it's more likely to be a Jira change than anything to do with Ventura.

Which is a pity as Atlassian just seem to ignore accessibility feedback as far as I can tell.

If anyone else is experiencing this problem, the iOS app does seem to be more accessible from the 2 minutes I've spent with it. But it's just not very convenient.

Hi Paul,

OK, so I'm typing. I'm going to proof my typing. I need two paragraphs before I can test to see if your bug is also my bug.

Here we go. I'm so excited! Can you tell I'm living a very boring life? I'm not complaining, mind. I could do enormously worse than dull. Alright, just a little more to get to a third line.

Oops. I just followed your directions. Result: No bug on my system. Here's what I have, in case it matters.

1. Mac Studio ultra

2. MacOS Monterey.

Nodding. That's got to be it. I have an older operating system..

I didn't upgrade to Monterey until this past august. The way things are looking, what with all the bug reports Ventura is getting, I probably won't upgrade to Ventura until next August. As you've heard me comment before, I've found that new Apple operating systems have the fewest bugs right before the next newest Apple operating system is released, and the advantages in me upgrading sooner just aren't worth the problems.

I do thank you and everyone else who upgrades right away and then laboriously start posting all the bugs you've found. The old new Apple operating system wouldn't be anywhere as bug free every August if it weren't for the efforts and pain of dedicated upgraders such as yourself. I thank you and all in total sincerity.

Good luck, and yes, I know, you're probably getting tired of hearing me say all this. Sorry about that, but not upgrading is a viable option no one else seems to point out.

Bruce

That's a great bit of detective work, Paul. I've been playing about with it and do notice that if I am on a blank line, then go down to the 2nd line of the following paragraph, then it does seem to trigger it.

You are definitely onto something, but it's more than just that. For example, moving down to the blank line above this paragraph also triggered it.

I have also seen it when moving up too.

I think Bruce is sensible sticking to Monterey. I'm still thinking as a sighted person where everything is usually just fine. I'm beginning to learn that things are different in this world, sadly. I am beginning to feel a bit defeated by it all, though. Reporting all the accessibility issues I find would be a full time job.

(Apple, if you're reading this....)

Bruce, I'm glad you've got the Monterey thing working for you.

To make not upgrading more viable, I'd like to see Apple integrate Time Machine into the App Store. If I'm going to stick with an old OS, I should still have the option of installing apps contemporary to that OS.

Paul,

I completely agree. Why Apple no longer allows downgrading is a complete mystery, especially with everything else Time Machine can do.

Meanwhile, it is worth noting that MacOS and IOS users have the option to turn off automatic upgrades, so if you choose to stay with the old newest OS, you can stay with the apps you have at the point when you make that choice.

Also, what I've been doing is waiting until about a month before the newest newest OS is released before upgrading to the newest OS, if that makes sense. Thus, I upgraded to Monterey a month before Ventura came out; I upgraded to Big Sur a month before Monterey came out, etc. In my experience so far, by following this practice I have been avoiding eleven months of bug fixing every time a new OS is released, and I have yet to have any problem with obsolescence of anything.

Joy!

Bruce