Activities, Command+Tab, and VO Preferences

Just to add more confusion, #2 would likely be related to, or be caused by, a new activity related bug in macOS 14 in which even moving to a different UI element in the same app can cause VO to not speak the element and reset the activity to VO settings. That is to say, the issue you’re speaking of has probably morphed into something worse. I’ve reported the issue to Apple, along with the screen recording and log they requested, though the macOS accessibility team seem to be far slower than for iOS.

Hey Paul,

Would Portable Preferences be a possible work-around for the issue with importing saved VO settings?

No idea. The issue I found is different to the OP’s in the sense that it changes the selected activity rather than losing data, but similar in the sense that it’s triggered by a focus change.

Never noticed these specific issues. One thing I have noticed about VO activities is that if you are on a web sight and you use the activity chooser to choose an activity, then command+tab away from that app, VoiceOver will switch back to the VoiceOver settings activity (default settings, no activity is selected). You will have to open the activity chooser and select it again.

Hey Paul.

You remember right. I tried activities a few times here and there and ran into the same issues. finally gave up on it. Smile. Still, at least Apple gets to brag about accessibility features, even if they never work, right?

I mainly use activities for coding vs normal use and generally they work quite well. The only thing that never worked was having a custom punctuation set for a custom activity which is quite irritating. I now just put up with the incredibly verbose default punctuation names such as "quotation mark" but in the grand scheme of things, that's not too bad.

I also have activities setup called "Slow Down" which uses a different voice at a slower speed, for those times when I am just struggling to figure out what is being said, and one which switches to Eloquence for some rare occasions where that's helpful (e.g. very long PascalCasedWords are spoken not spelled out in Eloquence vs other voices). Oh and one that switches to an American voice for the times I need to hear words in smart quotes.

I've found that having activities auto switch on web sites always works when I set them up but then after not very long I find it's not switching to them any more. Ans so I tend to just give up.

I noticed in Sonoma 14.0 that cmd+tab would not read out the first app properly - it would just hiss for a split second. I can't remember if it was activity based - I think it just did it all the time. But it was fixed in Sonoma 14.1. About the only thing Apple actually have fixed in Sonoma. I never noticed this in Ventura.

As mentioned, Sonoma did introduce a bug which has made manually switching activities a lot less useful. Now using any vo keys or bringing up a dialog will just switch back.

Finally I noticed a seemingly useless new feature in Sonoma where you can choose to auto switch activity based on some kind of workload category, like web browsing or word processing. I have absolutely no clue how it knows which app goes in which category, unless it only applies to Apple''s own apps. It just seems better to use the normal way so you know which apps are counting. Not sure if adding this ambiguous and pointless new feature is responsible for the new activity bugs or not. But you've got to wonder who is asking for a new feature like this.