macOS Sonoma: New Features, Changes, Improvements, and Bugs for Blind and Low Vision Users

we will have bugs, regardless of this update or any other. note, I wasn't criticizing Apple, because every software has bugs, and it is up to us if the Mac should be updated

I understand that there will always be some bugs, however this safari issue definitely needs to be addressed.

I ran the update, checked just now, so I guess i'm running the final release. A few behaviors persist. One, the double speaking of letters when I backspace like on this site never got fixed. Second, the predictive text is off yet behavior still happens in mail when I know I'll fix the typo in a second or I wasn't done yet anyway. I know you can speed up Siri on the phone, can it be done on Mac and watch OS? asking in general, i know this is about Sonoma

I completely agree. This Safari not responding behavior is absolutely unacceptable! It's just as bad as that ridiculous mouse issue in Monterey.

I apologize for the double post, but here's Apple's official change list for Sonoma.
https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/whats-new-in-voiceover-vo15627/mac#:~:text=VoiceOver%20now%20supports%20over%2020,)%2C%20Spanish%20(Chile)%2C

If your microsoft onedrive is running, and you will try to go to the status bar, voiceover's focus unexpectedly jumps in to onedrive. And you cannot scroll inside status bar for example to change wifi settings. You need to quit onedrive in order to use status bar as exspected.

although some people are reporting that the Safari not Responding issue persists on their Macs, in my particular case, the problem was solved after installing Sonoma. I even installed Ventura 13.6 this morning to see if the problem was only with v 13.5.2, which is the version that re introduced the probem in my Mac, but it was the same. I installed Sonoma 2 hours ago, and haven't heard the Safari is not responding message.

The only annoying issue I'm having in Safari is that Voiceover is not returning the focus to a link which I used to launch to another page, after getting back to the original page.

this is really amazing:
1. I confirm the stupid bug with OneDrive;
2. I confirm the stupid link bug;
3. In Numbers, VoiceOver still does not read Minus (-) (-234) before a negative number;
4. In Polish synthesizers it does not read currency numbers after the dot 4.8888 eur, 6.5622 $;
5. When moving quickly through the text, you can hear crackling sounds on the synthesizers. There is a tragedy in Polish lang;

My Capslock key wants to activate whenever I'm in an edit field. I disabled predictive text but that did not help.

I've been beta testing the beta on a seperate apfs volume than my main volume and... at the moment there are quite a few things stopping me from upgrading, with one being the single quicknav bug... its, frankly, annoying as all hell, and I rather wait until its fixed. Second, and more importantly, however, and I'd like to know if others have experiensed this,
I have vmware fusion and a vertual machine of windows 10. On mac os ventura it works perfectly but, for some reason under mac os sonoma it just... doesn't at all. Whenever I press startup, to start the vm... it looks for a second as if the machine will start, meaning the startup, button changes into, suspend, button, however one second later, it reverts back to startup, and the vm doesn't start at all. Not sure if its my specic vm, I mean its kinda old, or if its a vmware bfusion thing, but will have to keep testing this, as I use my vm practically daily, from things like working in word etc, to other stuff.
So i'll hold off on the upgrade... in any case no biggy since I can just boot into the other mac volume containing the beta and test things out, but I rather wait.
However not counting the vm ishue... I'll wait until the single key quicknav bug is fixed, because... My god that bug drives me up the wall! Once that bug gets squashed though... I mean great that voiceover finally has the two quicknav separated, although I do hope that bug gets fixed pretty quickly.

You probably need to wait for the next fusion release, if I remember right they usually come a little after the latest MacOS ships. You could try the tech preview and see if that akes a difference.

Hi, just installed the update and how do I add a widget to my desktop? I don't know if this is a bug or not, I cannot seem to type in edit fields unless I turn off single quicknav.

I think it's a known bug that if you have single key quick nav on, you can't type in edit fields, yet for me, that would kind of make sense. I mean if you are using H to go by headings, how do you write, Heading, when you have single quick nav on?

I agree, this arguably isn't a bug at all. It's the user's responsibility to turn single-key QuickNav on and off. This includes turning it off in order to type into a text field.

I appreciate that some people would like the feature to act differently, but that's a design issue and a feature request, not a bug. I think a case can be made on both sides, and I suspect Apple's UI designers have already made a choice about how it should work.

I completey agree the the single key quick nav is not a bug. But I aso think Apple could improve this feature if Voiceover could analyze the position of the Voiceover / keyboard focus and then determining when the focus is not on a Text or similar box, to use the typed letter as quick nav, and if the focus is on a text box, then just to insert the text in the box.

JAWS and NVDA have always allowed for quick one-key navigation, and you can type normally in the edit fields.

As I remember, in Jaws or NVDA, you have to open the form fields with enter to tipe something.

As far as I can tell, this isn't a bug. I don't personally have access to anything newer than Big Sur, but you have to interact with text fields to type in them, just like you have to make a text field editable on iOS before you can type. I highly suspect this isn't a bug as others have said, but a design choice which I agree with. If you don't want to deal with that, turn it off and use the standard VoiceOver navigation commands that have been around since Leopard.

Does this also allow you to find elements in an application using single letters? This doesn't work in Big Sur, but it would be very cool to press t to navigate to tables in programs such as VoiceOver Utility instead of VO Command t.

Maybe VoiceOver needs an auto forms mode setting like JAWS has had for years now. I can't remember when they introduced it, but I remember when people were talking about how it would be neat to be able to do that in the future and then it happened. They refined it later so you could set a delay when you landed on an edit field before the auto forms mode would kick in. I had mine set to around a second iirc. Something like that would be cool for VO.

I haven't had a Mac in years now, but I like the idea of single key quick nav being seperate from the arrow key quick nav. Is this also on iOS?

There are a lot of cool new features that I'd love to try, but I simply can't take roughly a week out of my life right now to upgrade, explore, and work around and report any new issues. The issues listed in this forum topic don't appear all that intimidating, but I fear the unknown issues that no one is reporting yet. I'll hold off on the upgrade for the time being.

As Carlos M Contreras said, macOS should be smart enough to disable single key quick nav based on the element with focus. iOS has been able to do this for years. I'm unsure what technical barrier is preventing macOS from following suit.

Let's say I'm in gMail and want to compose a message. Normally I hit C, I don't want that jumping me to the next combo box on the page. It's not just about typing in edit boxes, if you have a ffeature like single letter quick nav you really need to know how to toggle it to make the most of web apps and their native keyboard shortcuts.

Unfortunately, quick navigation only works in browsers and probably in e-mails.
I think it's stupid and limiting.
E.g. Pages, Notes, PDF files do not support this.

Hello everyone. I'm a bit late again to the party. I'm spending the night at my parents' place because I have a consultation with a periodontist in the morning. But anyway, I just updated and immediately noticed that Samantha is now in use on my Mac. I wonder if she's the new default voice. Also, this new QuickNav scheme is going to take a bit of getting used to but I'll get the hang of it very soon. In addition, I've no doubt I'll be exploring Sonoma in more detail in the coming weeks. But so far so good on my end. I'm honestly a bit surprised at how fast this thing updated, given the sluggishness of the wi-fi up here. All righty then...it's off to bed I go. Been kinda a busy few days here and I've got another busy one tomorrow. Cheers for now!

The iOS and WatchOS new versions sound terrible, but this sounds like it might be worth installing. The email link thing sounds annoying but it also doesn't sound like a particularly big deal given the number of existing focus bugs on the Mac.

I don't think I've ever been less excited by a major new Mac release and after Ventura I swore I wouldn't go in too early but this one sounds just about boring enough to try.

I'm glad they have fixed the login problems although as usual they tackle the least important things and not the rest of the VoiceOver experience such as the terrible text entry bugs and the horrible experience of trying to browse the web (either Safari is not responding, or just the many, many focus issues)

Have they fixed the problem with NumPad Commander not working in password fields?

I've updated since yesterday and have found one particular bug that is critical, at least for me personally.
When pressing VO+Left/Right arrow to read texts by paragraph from an HTML view, such as on a web page or from an email content for example, Voice Over erroneously repeats a random string of text.
One publicly accessible page where this issue could be reproduced is here:
https://libraryleadersforum.org

Please use VO+Left/Right arrow to navigate to the paragraph starting with "At our in-person session,". Then listen out for the last couple of words at the end of the first sentence.

For me, Voice Over repeats the ending phrase "n the digital age." twice.

I'm running Sonoma 14.0 on a MacBook Pro 14 M2. If you have Sonoma, either official or beta, please could you confirm if this issue occurs on your setup?
Thanks.

I've had this issue since Ventura, but some how it disappeared then. It comes back after updating to Sonoma unfortunately.
I suspect it is something to do with installing Karabiner, which will solve the caps-lock notification problem, and then removing it if you don't need to use the app. If this is actually the case, I remember removing the app will still keep the issue at bay.
But let me do a screen recording to report it to Apple first. I'll experiment with Karabiner to see if it could help anyhow and will let you know.
Note that I believe this issue only happens to those setting the Caps-Lock key to be the only VO modifier key. Like for my case, I do not opt to use the Control and Option keys at all.

I have mine set to where you can use both Capslock and Control Option.

With the Calendar app, I cannot use the VO+Up/Down Arrows to navigate one week at a time.
To reproduce the issue:
• Open Calendar app, then switch to Month View (pressing Command+3)
• Navigate to, and interact with the "Month Calendar Area"
• Navigate and interact with the grid
Now, you should land on the first Monday in the grid view. Pressing VO+Up/Down Arrows should jump to the previous/next day exactly one week apart from the current day.
In my case, VO+Left/Right Arrows goes to the next or previous day as expected, but VO+Up/Down Arrows cannot move to the next or previous week.

If you lose him after updating, simply do a VO Shift Command Left or Right Aero until you get to the VO menu. Then do VO Shift Command Down Aero and go through the voices and you should find him again.

This one worries me. The last thing we need is MacOs inventing more text that isn't there. I get enough of that when editing, so if it's starting to worm its way into reading as well that is concerning.

Can someone else who has taken the plunge try to reproduce it? I tried on the latest Ventura just for the sake of it, and it was fine.

I have been using Sonoma for the last couple of months as I installed beta 5 on a separate partition and then on to my main one once it became more stable. There are a couple of bugs that I have reported on, even before beta 5 as I was briefly testing beta 1 when that came out (Yes, the bugs I am about to indicate have existed since beta 1, with feedback reported.)
1. Those who use caps lock as a modifier may have noticed that if you use VO left and right arrow and you scroll over a text field, an alert will come up to turn caps lock off. This is supposed to be a feature, at least for sighted people, where a flashing icon appears when caps lock is on. However, this will cause your focus to reset and the only way to be rid of it is to release the caps lock key and then press it once again. While this is limited to textfields in some apps, others, such as Messages, can show the alert where you least expect it. For example, if you are looking through your messages and scroll to the last message, the alert will come up. Releasing caps lock sends you back to the Message field, and interacting with the messages list will send you back up to the top, earlier messages. The only work-around, other than using control and option as your modifiers, is to ensure that you quickly release caps lock when you scroll to the last message.
2. If you are someone who uses a voice that is not American, or the Indian voice, Rishi, items with smart quotes around them will not read in certain contexts. I will show this at the last line of the comment and you may see it. If nothing follows the smart quote, it will not be read out. If something comes after, it will be read. To be clear, smart quote is where VoiceOver will say something like "Left double quotation mark" and "right double quotation mark," instead of just "quotation mark," when scrolling by character.
3. The same voices that cannot read smart quotes properly will also not correctly read repeated letters. When there are more than three of a character, these voices will read two. For instance, 4 X's will read "X X," not "X X X X." (I separated the characters with spaces so I hope that those skim reading with VoiceOver will hear this correctly.)

The other bugs mentioned are definitely note worthy, although the issue with single key quicknav may not be an issue at all. Tabbing to edit boxes usually works for me, and as was shown in a comment above, interacting with the edit box will also disable it. Of course, VO Q also works.

I will post an update if any of the above issues are fixed. In the mean time, here are a couple of sentences indicating the issue with the quotes.

“The following sentence should be read out if you are using Daniel or another voice that is not American,” I said.
I said, “This line may not be read correctly.”

Edit: I forgot to note a work-around regarding the issue of not reading quotes. You can press VO F3 (Or VO FN 3) to get it to read the item. Because it is followed by the text "is in the VoiceOver cursor." Or, if you are happy to do so, switch to an American voice or Rishi to get your quotes reading correctly again. I have no idea why Rishi works as well as the American voices, but there you have it...

I just tried on my end. I confirm that the bug #2 and #2 does appear here.
However, for the bug where VO won't read texts inside smart quotes, I have another workaround. Normally, I have the punctuation mode, "most", customised, to make Voice Over read out some key punctuations such as dash, m dash, n dash, and quotes. So, as with your explanation, with the phrase "right quote", being added after what is actually appearing on the screen, VO will not run into this issue and will be able to read the string normally.

Well against my better judgment I upgraded to Sonoma just now. I had been wrangling with a few annoying macOS bugs during the week so wanted to see if anything had been resolved, although I can guess. The login screen seemed to work without me restarting VOiceOver which was nice.

I tried to reproduce Jimmy's bug but it seemed to work correctly for me.

This bug was introduced a couple of Ventura releases ago and sorry to say is still present in Sonoma. I had hoped that being a recent bug we might have got lucky.
This is where using the numpad commander on a password field enters in characters instead of working like VoiceOver should.

After upgrading all my voices were changed to Serena Premium. My default voice was Stephanie which changed, but also I have activities that change the voice to Eddie/Eloquence and Siri, both of which were changed. Not sure if this is similar to the Alex problem reported above.

I noticed that in the Manage Voices screen, trying to navigate by headings kept giving me VoiceOver Utility is not responding over and over again. Plus the navigation here was really quirky. For example, there was a heading for English UK Eloquence, but I could only sometimes navigate to it. Under it was Eddie, but going back the other way went straight past the heading to Daniel. I think there were problems navigating by heading here with Ventura so this might not be new.

The other thing I noticed... on Ventura I dabbled with using Siri as the main voice but found that sometimes it was really slow - there was an obvious pause navigating between lists before it would speak. I'm not sure if this is fixed or if I was just looking in a different place, but I did notice with Siri that it is unbelievably slow to read characters as I am typing them. Like the rate has been set to 10 or something. This is UK Siri voice 1 I think (original Female voice). So had to turn that off again.

I also think that when I switch to the Eddie activity (now I have fixed the voice), it does seem much slower than before. I know I can adjust the WPM or rate but it felt quite noticeable as a default. I remember when installing Ventura it sped up all the voices so don't think it's the first time they have tinkered with this sort of thing.

Sorry to be spamming this thread, I have found another little enhancement. I have indentation set to play a sound when coding. In Ventura this really slowed down browsing the code. It would ping, then pause, then read a line of code. Now it starts reading immediately, so you hear the ping and speech at the same time. Providing this actually works when using it for real, this could be a really big improvement because I always found it really slow when reading code.

I don't want Siri to respond without the Hey. (I have a Ziggy Echo in this room and it's likely to get confused). But the "Listen for" dropdown list in the Siri settings does not appear to be accessible with VoiceOver.

If I open the menu and then use up and down arrows I just hear it struggle to say Tick and Off but not much else. Anyone found a magic way of being able to do this?

Well, maybe I have come across some repeated text.

https://www.thisisanfield.com/2023/09/confirmed-liverpool-lineup-vs-tottenham-nunez-and-trent-on-bench/

"Alexander-Arnold is fit enough for the bench and will be an option for the manager, as will " is spoken when I VO+Right to it, then repeated when I press VO+right again.

I've also had some horrible focus problems trying to read this article. It really is all over the place.

The first few times I tried Safari kept telling me something like "profess 90%" over and over again as I was trying to read it. Or even if I just left the keys alone. It eventually stopped on the 3rd or 4th attempt.

I can't say for sure that these problems wouldn't have occurred in Ventura, although I have been to this site before and don't remember anything like that.

It is disheartening to find that web browsing on a Mac with Safari is still a horrible experience in 2023.

Hi Jimmy & all,

I just installed macOS Sonoma 14.0 on my M2 Mac mini. I tried the link you suggested, and I am not getting the double reading of the last two words of the first sentence in the paragraph you referenced. I am using the Eloquence synthesizer with the Reid US voice. I tried switching to different synthesizers, and none give me the double reading you mention.

Hope this helps,

Russell

Hi all,

Since installing Sonoma I am no longer getting the annoying "Safari not responding" messages when going to a new web page. Very glad about that.

Cheers,

Russell

Hello,
I am afraid that this is to do with the issue I described above. Most voices, apart from the American ones or Eloquence, cannot read items surrounded by VoiceOver smart quotes. That is where VoiceOver reads "Left double quotation mark" rather than "quotation mark." As someone mentioned above, if you change your punctuation to All, or make a custom group based on All and remove the ones you don't want speaking, it will be a tempery fix for the problem.

I hope this can help.

Hello,
Sorry for posting two items here in a short space of time, but there is a bug I forgot to mention last time that I think is very important. Once again, Apple has had feedback about this since MacOS Sonoma beta 5 or so.

If you use the Activity chooser to switch to a different activity in an app that does not have its own activity, VoiceOver will switch back to the default as soon as you move the VoiceOver cursor. If you switch back to VoiceOver Settings while in an app with a custom activity, the activity will be reset back to the one for that app, again, once you move the VoiceOver cursor, or the window changes. This might be very irritating in apps like Parallels, where you might have made an activity with no speech or sound. If you then need to make a configuration change, as soon as you navigate with VoiceOver Settings selected, speech and sound will stop as the activity is reset to the one used for Parallels.

I also personally have an issue where I can't get activities to start per website. I have to manually switch to them. However, here is the one place where I can choose what activity I want. If I use the Activity Chooser in Safari, the activity will remain the one I chose. Once again however, it will reset once I switch out of Safari.

If anyone knows a better solution to this than just set up an automatic trigger for every activity, do let me know. :)

After I updated to the latest version of macOS, my support worker report it to me of zooming away icons on the screen, even though no settings have been changed. This only happened whilst VoiceOver was on.

I changed the default voice to Ava (Premium) and this did fix the wake word combo - thank you! I have a couple of activities - one that changes to Eddie/Eloquence and a different one that changes the punctuation to full (still using Stephanie). Neither of the activities fixed the problem.

Why does VoiceOver have so much trouble with punctuation?

On the subject of Activities, I can confirm that it swaps back to the standard VO activity as soon as you use the VO keys.

I've got to say the Customise Voices list is really, really bad. If I navigate by headings forwards it navigates between three UK English types, but won't go further - so won't go to Australia, US etc. If I go back to the start and then go back again I get VO Utility not responding. So I ended up just pressing VO+right a million times until I got to the US languages.

Has anyone noticed any differences using VO+J?

On Friday when I was on Ventura, I could use VO+J to bounce between message list and a couple of other things in Outlook. Now it seems to go all over the place, and I end up getting stuck in search eventually. It feels like the navigation has completely changed.

I then fired up Chrome. Before VO+J would bounce between toolbar, bookmarks bar and the web content. Now it goes between Close and New Tab. Well it was, now it's getting stuck in new tab on its own.

VO+J seems to work better in Mail. It seems unlikely that both Chrome and Outlook happened to update since last Friday so I assume it's a Sonoma problem.

Actually, the behaviour is different in Safari. I'm sure prior to Sonoma VO+J would just go to the toolbar, and not much else. Now it's bouncing around different lambdmarks on the page. Although this behaviour might be useful as I think maybe it's jumping around landmarks or something, I'd rather it was a different key as VO+J was useful for just quickly getting to the main parts of an app. If it's going to get stuck in the content then it's an entirely different function in my opinion.

For the sake of my sanity, can anyone confirm that this is definitely different now?

Yet more little bits annoying me this wmorning...

I wrote a comment in Jira, and was using Option+right arrow to skip through the words. But it was repeating almost every word as I moved through the sentence.

Now I always write web stuff in a text editor (Smultron) before copy and pasting it in because doing any text editing in a web browser is problematic. So I went back to Smultron.

Although it didn't have the same problem, I noticed on the first paragraph it was going ping every time, probably the indentation noise. No, the line was indented. On the second paragraph this didn't happen. And writing this comment here it didn't occur at all.

So it seems that Sonoma has somehow managed to make text editing even more random and annoying than ever before.

In web pages (Safari or Chrome), then navigting some headings the text of the heading is not spoken out.

This is very apparent with Atlassian sites like Confluence and Bitbucket.

For example, if I am reading a Confluence document and navigate to a heading:

In Sonoma: 2 items heading level 2
In Ventura: 2 items. requitements. Copy link to heading.

This is horrible. It means to browse by heading you need to go to each heading then vo+right to find out what it is. Or use the web rotor.

I've got to say the more I use Sonoma the more I regret updating to it. As with a lot of things in Macos it's not that there is a single showstopper bug, it's just death by 1000 cuts.

OK this is really crap. So I am using PyCharm and am noticing several issues that were not there in Ventura.

So let's say I go to a function function. I'm sat on "def" which is the first word on the line. I press option+right to skip a word. It says "def". Fine. I press optoin+right. It now speaks the name of the function plus the bracket. For example "test left parenthesis". In the past it would just read the name of the function. This is confusing for two reasons. Firstly, it suggests that the cursor is to the rtight of the bracket, but it's not, it's to the left. But, worse, if I press Option+right again it just speaks "left parenthesis" for a second time. This now suggests that there are 2 open brackets, which is just not the case.

Now, if I have a function that takes more than one argument I get this kind of thing with the commas. So it might read "self comma", then I press option+_right and it says "comma" then option+right again and "first comma" (if first is the name of the first parameter), then option+right again and it will repeat "comma", then option+right again to get "second comma". When I get to the last one it speaks the name of the parameter followed by "right parenthesis colon". Then optoin+right again and "righ tparenthesis colon".

If I try the same thing in Text Edit, it's similar. It reads the punctaution character after each word, but then does not repeat then when moving Option+right..

I should say that this requires punctuation to be spoken. I have "All" and no custom punctuation, because that's another thing that doesn't work.

One thing that drives me totally insane at work is that my typing isn't great, so I often end up with rogue punctuation where it shouldn't be. I can spend a significant portion of my day just chasing around where I've messed up the punctuation. This is going to be significantly harder now I've upgraded to Sonoma.

Honestly, this is the most upsetting thing I have found so far. Particularly because I have no confidence that Apple will fix it. If there was an easy way to roll back to Ventura then I would do it. I would urge any other VoiceOver uses to give it a miss for now.

I am disappointed with the changes to Single Key Navigation in Safari on macOS Sonoma, which I have found to be a big hit on efficiently navigating web pages.

With Single Key navigation turned on, I now have to interact with tables on web pages before I can use Single Key navigation within the table contents, and then have to move back out of the table for Single Key navigation to work on the rest of the web page. This interrupts the flow and efficiency of navigation.

I'm also experiencing far more times when Single Key navigation simply doesn't work, and I have to switch away from Safari and back again to get it working again.

Another issue I'm experiencing is that focus regularly jumps to either the address field or tab bar after activating links.

While I'm sure Apple's intentions were to improve navigation, I feel that these changes have made Single Key Navigation less fluid and efficient.

I'm curious to hear if others are finding these changes as disruptive to their VoiceOver workflow. Does anyone know if it's possible to configure VoiceOver on Sonoma in such a way that QuickNav can behave the same as previously - essentially being able to use the arrow keys to toggle both QuickNav and Single Key navigation at the same time?