When Your Mac Keeps Beeping At You

By Daniel Parker, 14 November, 2023

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi all,

Wondering how others deal with this. It usually happens for me when there's some popup on the screen, and VoiceOver plays a tone every 30 seconds. However I have not found a way to get to the popup with VO, only by blundering around with the mouse. This time not even that worked.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Daniel

Options

Comments

By Bryn on Friday, November 24, 2023 - 12:27

Hi there, if you press VO+F1 twice, at the top of the menu that pops up, there is a system dialogs option. Go into there and you can see what dialogs the system has open requesting your attention. Hope this helps!

By Daniel Parker on Friday, November 24, 2023 - 12:27

Never heard of that one. It does, thanks!

By mr grieves on Friday, November 24, 2023 - 12:27

One thing you can do if you hear weird sounds being played is to use VO+H to open up help, then type "Sounds" and press enter. You now have a list of all the sounds you are likely to hear and what they mean.

I had this exact problem with the system dialog and this was how I eventually found out what it meant. Hopefully the above answer sorted you out anyway, but thought this was worth mentioning.

The other instance of a weird sound I personally had was that I had accidentally mapped 6 to start dictation which is easy to do if you are using num pad commander and browsing the keyboard settings menu. It took me ages to figure out why it kept beeping strangely as I was moving around. Again probably not your problem but might help someone if they stumble on this post.

By Siobhan on Friday, November 24, 2023 - 12:27

Subject line says it. I never thought of figuring out what sounds meant. Must explore this.

By mr grieves on Friday, November 24, 2023 - 12:27

This is a stupid one but it has caught me a few times, as it did just now. If you accidentally have caps lock turned on you will get all sorts of weird noises as you move around and type. I was going up and down the sounds in the help menu but still couldn't find it before it suddenly dawned on me.

Apologies for hijacking this thread a little but think others may come here for weird noises so maybe this can save someone some head scratching.

By Levi Gobin on Sunday, December 24, 2023 - 12:27

You can disable the system dialog reminder beeps if they are annoying.
In the verbosity catagory in VO Utility, press the announcements tab.
Under when system dialogs are displayed, choose "Do Nothing."
That should fix the issue.