Is there a way to get safari out of the side bar?

Is it only daily mail.co.uk? Or other web sites too? Can you elaborate on what you do exactly to get this bug triggered?
It sounds like you are stuck in the tab overview when you press Command L.

Sorry if I misunderstood your post. Been up since the crack of dawn.....

It’s been a while since I left mac but I’m guessing niether of those work otherwise you wouldn’t have posted this. The other option is of course to never ever ever go to the daily mail. lol.

VO + Shift + down arrow or up arrow interacts and stops interacting respectively. VO + "j" is the red headed step child no one here really wants to acknowledge.

Exactly, thats why I suggested VO up arrow to stop interacting with the sidebar. I knew Siobhan would have tried that as its standard navigation but you never know which is why I thought it wouldn’t hurt to write it just in case she was stuck on trying to tab out. I wasn’t aware VO J had become the devil since I last had a mac. Back in the pre pandemic era it was a little unreliable and unpredictable but wasn’t at the level it has clearly ascended to since then.

I'm sure she has tried everything under the sun to get out of the tab overview. I know I have been stuck in it a few times on Monterey and/or Ventura. And it usually takes pressing Command + W to close the window entirely. Not the browser, but the window I'm stuck in.

Her issue seems either unique to her Mac/use case, or I am too braindead this lovely Saturday afternoon to understand it clearly. 😅

This does happen to me occasionally, and I just saw it happen, so it's fresh in my head. Like all things MacOS-Safari, it's random, not reproducible, and has nothing to do with the specific website.

One difference: I do not keep the Sidebar open. Otherwise, I'm sure this is the same issue.

I was attempting to read a website that I visit so often that I leave it open in a tab. This was the first time I tried to read the website since booting a few hours ago. I can VO+Left and Right arrow through all the boilerplate Safari controls (toolbar, tab bar, vertical splitter, etc.). But when I VO+Right from the Vertical Splitter into the main web area, I hear VO announce Web Content, and that's all I get. Here's what I tried.

* While I'm on the Web Content, VO+F3 says, Web Content. VO+F2 correctly announces the name of the website.

* Interacting with Web Content doesn't give me access to the web page. VO says Interacting with Web Content, but the situation remains the same. I'm pretty sure it said, Content is Empty. But I have enough residual vision to see that the web page is displayed visually and scrolls up and down when I scroll with the mouse.

* As Siobhan said, VO+U gives me the Windows Spots menu, but no menu for links, headings, etc.
* Command+R refreshes the page but doesn't change the situation.

* VO+F to find content that I know is on the web page fails to find anything.

* VO+J moves me to the Web Content, but doesn't otherwise change the incorrect behavior.

* Command+F5 to toggle VoiceOver doesn't change the situation.

* Control+Tab to other websites works fine, and the other websites do not exhibit this issue.

The only workaround I have found is to Command+W close the tab, then Command+T open a new tab and re-enter the URL. I didn't try Command+Q and restarting, though I imagine that would also work.

Tabs:
Are you using compact or standard tabs?
Are you using horizontal or vertical tab layout?
Reader view or standard view?

Bars:
You mentioned side bar being disabled/hidden, but what about Toolbars?
The favorites bar?

Refreshing the page:
You mentioned command + "r" to refresh, but have you tried option + command + "r" to refresh from the server?
Have you tried toggling VO on and off?

Just some things to try out. 😀

When I hit Command+T to open a new tab and go to the address bar, normally I hear VoiceOver announce, "smart search field Search or enter website name has alternate items."

Other times, I press Command+T, and VoiceOver is incorrectly silent, leading me to believe that nothing has happened. But it has happened to me enough times that I know a new tab is open and focus is in the address bar, so if I simply type the URL as normal and press return, the web page loads normally and VoiceOver works fine.

Safari not responding, empty web content, Siobhan's issue, and the Command+T weirdness. One thing they all have in common: VoiceOver misbehaving while using Safari in a way that is intermittent and almost 100% not reproducible.

Instead of Command (T) try Command (N) to open a new window. Do everything else as you normally would within Safari, with the understanding not to use Tabs.

I cannot say for certain at this point, but IMO ever since they added the ability for us to modify our Tabs, the tab functionality has gone down the drain.

Just my observations, if you can trust a blind man to "observe" anything.

I can switch to using windows instead of tabs, but the issue is so intermittent it could be months before I know if it makes a difference.

I agree with your assessment that tabs have gone downhill. Sometimes I manage to open multiple tab groups by accident and I have no idea how I'm doing it. Once that happens, switching between the tab groups, identifying what tabs are open in each tab group, and closing unwanted tab groups are all twelfth level wizardry spells that elude my mastery.

I just CMD + L to the URL bar and press enter to reload it that way, that's the only way I've found so far to get it back to normal again

Not the best 'fix' for you, but I have a Keyboard Commander shortcut which does the exact same thing as a 3 finger double tap on your iPhone/Mac. In other words, it mutes VO speech. Good for typing out long strings like addresses, etc.
Anyway, I have my KB shortcut set as:
Option + Shift + 'V'.

Might at the very least help with VO spazzing out on you while in the address bar. 🤷

Is why you adore me. True story. 😇

It just happened again, while opening AppleVis.com.

Yes, I was opening it in a tab. Old habits die hard. Sequence of events:
* I press Command+T. Nothing out of the ordinary.
* I enter "applevis.com" and press Enter.
*VoiceOver says nothing, which is out of the ordinary.
* VO+F2 correctly identifies the window name as AppleVis.
* VO+F3 tells me I'm in the address bar.
* VO+U will only let me look at Window Spots.

Based on above random suggestions, I tried a few things. I navigated to the tab bar, found the tab for the new AppleVis tab, performed a right mouse click, and selected Move Tab to New Window. This gave me two windows, one with my usual handful of tabs, the other with AppleVis, which was still unresponsive.

So I went back to my first window and repeated everything, starting with Command+T, This time, AppleVis opened without issue.

Next, I switched over to the dead AppleVis window and it was still dead. This proves the problem isn't with the server.

Finally, I did a refresh from origin with Command+Option+R. And the dead AppleVis window was still dead. So I closed it.

Now I'm back in my first window, the one with all the tabs, and I'm in the tab I used for the second AppleVis attempt. It all works fine. It's baffling.

Honestly, all this bizarre Safari and VoiceOver behavior is exhausting. I just wish they'd fix this mess they've created. It's a web browser, for heaven's sake. It's not finding billion-digit prime numbers or searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence in SETI data or trying to pick out early signs of cancer from CAT scans or playing chess or solving the traveling salesman problem or picking tomorrow's winning lottery numbers. Why can't they just make it work?

Stop using tabs.

Bool,
The End.

After the first attempt in a tab failed, the second attempt in a tab worked fine. And I'm in a tab now. So unless you have hard evidence that tabs are the source of this issue, I'm skeptical.

It should be worth noting that I sometimes see similar behavior with Google Chrome.

I keep Chrome open to exactly one website, so it's not using tabs, other than the single tab in the single window. Most of the time, I have no problem with this usage. I Command+Tab to Chrome and the website is there and functional.

However, every once in a while, VoiceOver won't interact with the HTML content on the page. If I press VO+U, all I have access to is the Window Spots menu, very much like what is described in this thread with Safari.

Unlike Safari, I can fix the problem in Chrome with a simple refresh Command+R.

Was just that, a suggestion. I offered it because I have not seen this behavior as you and others have described. I am on Sonoma (14.1) and never use tabs myself. I just find it easier to have multiple windows that I can swap through as needed. Or use Mission Control with.

So yeah, just an offered suggestion to try. Nothing more.

Best. system. ever.