Hey guys, I'm a multilingual speaker, and although I use the Mac primarily in English, sometimes I need to do work in another language. However if the keyboard is not set to English, rather to a non-Latin based keyboard such as Cyrillic or Arabic keyboards, the VoiceOver shortcuts for navigation are not working. On Latin based keyboards such as Spanish or German they work without a problem.
This is a serious concern, since I can't always have, and don't want to have the keyboard set to English. Is there a way to fix this and to make the shortcuts work regardless of the keyboard? This works flawlessly with NVDA on windows.
Bonus question, is there a way to more easily change the keyboard? Currently I use CTRL + Space and CTRL + Option + Space but this is too slow and very finnicky with 5 keyboards. They don't seem to change in a particular order but seem to be random.
By Rasgueo, 21 November, 2023
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
You're not alone
You're not alone in facing issues with VoiceOver commands on non-Latin keyboards like Cyrillic or Arabic on Mac. These shortcuts are optimized for Latin-based keyboards, which is why they work fine with Spanish or German layouts but not others.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there's no direct fix in macOS to make VoiceOver fully compatible with all keyboard types. A workaround could be setting up custom shortcuts for each layout, but this can be a bit of a hassle.
I personally think that CTRL + Space and CTRL + Option + Space is your best bet, although it's kinda tricky.
Maybe you can check out some third-party apps? Unfortunately, I don't know any, but maybe someone else does