I encountered an unusual and perplexing issue today with VoiceOver, one that I believe warrants attention and collective insight from our community. While using Safari, I noticed that it became completely unresponsiveāa problem encounter daily but never thought of investigating it further. What truly caught my attention, however, was the profound impact this had on my Mac's overall performance.
As many of us are aware, VoiceOver, Typically, operates with remarkable efficiency, utilizing an average of 10 to 40 units of energy (as measured in the Energy Impact section of the Activity Monitor). However, today's experience was far from typical.
When Safari became unresponsive, VoiceOver's Energy Impact suddenly surged to an astonishing 4000 unitsāan alarming departure from its usual behavior. While the specific unit of measurement remains unclear to me, this surge was exceptional and had an adverse effect on my Mac's performance, causing it to overheat, and more significantly for Safari not to respond in a crucial moment of my work.
Here's where it gets even more intriguing: I attempted to troubleshoot the issue by turning VoiceOver off and then back on. To my surprise, this seemingly simple action resulted in a significant reduction in the Energy Impact, which dropped to a more manageable level of around 20 units.
This observation has left me both baffled and intrigued. I've noticed similar reports of this issue in various forums, indicating that I'm not alone in experiencing this anomaly. It's a concern not only because it disrupts our Mac's performance but also because it could potentially have long-term implications for the hardware.
I will report this to Apple Accessibility, so please do report the same findings if you find the above applicable to your experience.
Thanks
By Maldalain, 24 September, 2023
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
Interesting result
My theory on this has been that it is a multithread or multiprocess deadlock issue, in which two threads or processes are waiting on each other to release the locks they are holding. In a case like that, the processes would typically sleep and use zero CPU time.
But it sounds more like at least one process is repeatedly checking on the availability of some system resource. Or in some other kind of loop, and therefore consuming tons of CPU time. So much for my deadlock theory.
Slight topic change. When getting the Safari not responding message, I've found that all VoiceOver commands are ignored, but other commands work, as far as I can tell. For example. I can still open a new tab with Command+T, enter a URL, press enter, and have the new web page load, all while hearing "Safari not responding" in response to every keystroke. Once the message goes away, the new web page is there, ready for me to use.
On the other hand, VoiceOver commands are ignored. I've tried VO+Command+H a few times, but when VoiceOver becomes responsive again, focus has not advanced through the headers. I've also tried VO+I, but when the message goes away, the Item Chooser has not opened.
I'd like to think this is some profound discovery with great implications, but I must admit I don't know what to make of it. LOL.
Broken VoiceOver
VoiceOver is broken, pure and simple. If Apple is unable and/or unwilling to fix this very obviously broken behavior that prevents us from doing one of the most basic tasks on a computer, I say we should vote with our wallets.
Interesting
This is very interesting. I hope APple does fix this, but as far as I know it's been years.