Stop telling me where the insertion point is!

By mr grieves, 15 October, 2022

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I'm finding that quite often both Mail and Safari on my Mac (latest Monterey) will keep telling me where the insertion point is as I'm trying to read something.

So I'm reading a web page or email and after every sentence it says something like"insertion point at end of text". For web pages, refreshing usually cures it. For email, I'm not entirely sure how to fix it. Restarting VoiceOver does nothing. It's really annoying when reading a long message.
Does anyone know why it's doing this and if there's.a way to get it to shut up?

Options

Comments

By mr grieves on Wednesday, October 26, 2022 - 21:24

I should say it only does it when using VO modifiers. E.g. VO+left and VO+right, or skipping to headings or whatever. If I use cursor keys it doesn't give me this extra info. But is is still driving me nuts.

By mr grieves on Saturday, November 26, 2022 - 21:24

This is driving me nuts - does no one else experience it? I'm getting it all the time in Mail, and some web sites in Safari.

By Brad on Saturday, November 26, 2022 - 21:24

it's a bit drastic but can you move to windows for now? This doesn't happen here in windows land.

If not; I hope someone tells you how to fix it.

I just thought of something, could you mess around in the dictionary, type what it says and replace it with a space or something?

By mr grieves on Saturday, November 26, 2022 - 21:24

I'm not proficient enough with Windows to use it for anything remotely productive yet, sadly. Probably better off trying a different email client and moving off Safari entirely. I'm just too set in my ways!!

I like your sneaky idea, but sadly it often says something like "insertion point at such and such between words x and y" so the message is different each time.

I'll have to email apple accessibility at some point I suppose, not that it does any good.

By Devin Prater on Saturday, November 26, 2022 - 21:24

This happens to me. It's embarrassing that that's still an issue like 2 versions after being discussed and feedback filed.

By mr grieves on Monday, December 26, 2022 - 21:24

I have had a couple of calls with Apple support about this now and they suggested I reset my VO settings. So I exported my preferences and did this and it does seem to fix the problem.

Unfortunately I've customised VO so much that I can't cope with it like that, so had to re-import. Over the weekend I guess I'll start the process of setting it all up again and see if I can find the setting that causes it.

By mr grieves on Monday, December 26, 2022 - 21:24

I did some more digging around with this. In my VO settings, I have the default verbosity set to Low. If I change it to Medium the problem goes away. If I reset to defaults, it sets it to High. If I then change it to Low then the problem starts happening again.

By mr grieves on Monday, December 26, 2022 - 21:24

OK I mighty be talking too soon, but I may have a proper fix.

I set verbosity to Low. I then changed the "text" verbosity to Medium. As far as I can tell, I'm not getting any extra feedback but I\m also not being told where the insertion point is all the time.

I've only given it a quick test in Mail, so no doubt I will find some problems it causes elsewhere.