macOS Sequoia Beta Comprehensive Bugs/Accessibility Issues Thread

Just as unreliable as usual. It seems to be worse in beta 4 than in other betas.
I just booted into my beta testing partition on the Mac and went to connect.
It told me that I needed to “unlock my iPhone and follow the instructions” then proceeded to tell me that I needed to lock my iPhone in order to use iPhone mirroring. After my phone was locked, I got the previous mentioned message telling me to follow the instructions.
This time after a few seconds, the passcode field appeared on my iPhone. After entering my passcode it connected only for a few seconds. you cannot access the home screen, or the app switcher, or anything else but the lock screen, just like in previous betas. In fact, if you don’t touch the phone for several seconds, it locks. Then the Mac complains because iPhone mirroring was interrupted, and to make sure Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are enabled.
I will say, that ever since beta three, I have gotten my iPhone notifications on the Mac. After pbooting my Mac into my beta testing partition, I would get flooded with hundreds of notifications spoken by voiceover, but they wouldn’t show up in the notifications list (VO+N) but they would show up in the notification center.
acting on the notifications would do nothing at all. It would attempt to start iPhone mirroring, but once it was connected, you wouldn’t be able to access the app because he would only be able to access the Lock Screen.
Also, in order to even use the phone with your keyboard, you have to turn off voiceover. Even if all you could only access was the lock screen, the audio of your phone does not come through the Mac, so you couldn’t have your phone in a handbag or purse as shown in WWDC.
I really hope Apple fixes this, because I want to love iPhone mirroring if it works.
Edit: forgot to mention that Voiceover behaves as if the command key is permanently stuck down. Pressing control option L says no link found, instead of reading current line. Thought I would add this as well.

Oh OK. Any voice improvements? or the same as with pryer versions.

Saying this super tentatively, but safari seems to be solid now. I think we may have lost the ability to wrap back up under the page, IE shift and tab at the top of the page to reach the last element on the page, but I've been using it for a good three or four days now, since whenever it dropped anyway, and zero SNR.

Regarding iPhone Mirroring, I'd not hold our breath for it working. I don't think it's going to be accessible for launch. There has been no improvement over the three iterations of the beta. As I mentioned above, if there were going to be accessibility built in, it would have been there before being pushed out to beta testers. This is all just fine tuning what is already here.

That would be absolutely wonderful if true. You know, I think SNR started way back in Catalina.

How many versions ago was that? 🙄

MacOS catalina was released in 2019, so that was 5 years ago. and good to know that safari is more stable, and that the SNR bug is gone, for now at least. I wouldn't hold my breath, let's keep our fingers crossed that it continues throughout the beta cycle..

Hell, cross your eyes and your toes as well, but yes it is great news if it truly is (finally) fixed.

I am glad to have found this thread. I will have a new to me m1 macbook air next week, and am already rocking the iOS 18 public beta, so my inclination would have been to install the mac os beta as well, but looks like I'll be holding off for now on that.

The previous beta any hang crashed safari completely for me, so it got a lot worse before it got better.

Yes, there is still a lot of time between now and release but it kinda feels weird with no SNR... It's like a really drawn out jump scene in a horror movie. Just waiting for it.

Yeah, I noticed sluggish behaviour elsewhere and it might have been just that safari was the most used of those apps so we saw it more.

Yep 2019. that was when MacOS catalina was released, so bugs and issues come and go. I have been beta testing since iOS 9. so that's normal. 2019 was 5 years ago.

I have noticed in the public beta that menu navigation doesn't work like it used to in previous versions of Mac OS. Before, after pressing VO + m to jump to the menu bar, I could then press the letter of the menu I wanted to jump to, such as e for edit, v for view, etc. But now when I try to do this, it just jumps to something inside that first menu, the Apple menu, I guess whatever is closest to the letter I typed in. I did report this a few releases ago, but it hasn't changed. Can anyone else confirm this behavior? It doesn't break menu navigation exactly, all menus and all menu items are still fully accessible, but it does take longer to get where I want to go.

As you know, following todays apple event, apple will release the RC of MacOS Sequoia, so here's hoping all of the issues that everyone has mentioned will be fixed pryer to public release. fingers cross.

There was a bug introduced in Sonoma that caused that behaviour. Have you turned on the option that makes the mouse pointer follow the VO cursor by any chance? If so, try turning that off as it fixes it in Sonoma anyway.

I'll take a look at that, as I don't remember that being turned on but never had the issue in Sonoma.

That fixed it! Thank you so much. It was driving me nuts!

I was able to add widgets to the desktop in Sonoma with no issues. Not so anymore. No matter what I do, I end up not adding to the desktop, or with the same widget added multiple times in notification center. I haven't tried iPhone mirroring for a few releases now. I hope that at some point they get that working with Voiceover.

macOS 15 has been pretty good for me on my M1 MacBook Pro, except for a couple of bugs:
The first bug, and the least of my issues right now, is that personal voices cannot be used with VoiceOver. It switches to the Samantha voice and is very laggy.
The second issue on the other hand, is a big pain in the rear.
For some reason, when adding the Karen compact voice to the voice Router, it creates a no named Voice. Actually, it’s just a dash character with a couple of spaces on either side of it.
The voice will show up with voiceover, but if you click done, it appears in your voice rotor, but does not appear in the Voice list in VO utility. Adding the voice again, does the exact same thing, except puts a "(2)" at the end of the name.
I don’t know about macOS, but the only way to get rid of these "ghost voices"is to reset all settings on iOS.
Since you can reset VoiceOver settings on Mac, this might fix the issue, but I’m holding off doing that because currently exporting your preferences does not save the Voice list.
I have reported this to Apple when I first experienced it on iOS. Has anybody else experienced this bug?
Before you go trying it yourself, remember, the voice will always be there until you reset all settings on iOS, or maybe reset voiceover settings on macOS, But as mentioned above, I have not tested that method.

I did some further testing on a secondary partition running macOS 15 RC, and the only way to remove these ghost voices is by going to voiceover utility>file>reset basic Voiceover preferences.
According to voiceover utility, these things will be reset to their factory default values:
Basic VoiceOver preferences include all General, Verbosity, Navigation, Web, Sound, and Visuals settings, Voice settings, and non-command related settings for NumPad, Option key, trackpad gestures, and braille displays. These options will be reset to their default values. This action can’t be undone.
I really wish ios could give you a similar option. You can only reset commands to their factory defaults, but that doesn’t help us here, does it?
Hopefully Apple gets this fixed. It’s present in both 15.1 dev Beta 3, and 15.0 RC.

Hi all, I'm on an intel MacBook Air; the last one they released right before going to Apple Silicon. Bad luck for me I know. Anyway, I don't know if this issue is specific to intel macs or not, but VoiceOver is frequently crashing and restarting itself. It's happened throughout the entire Sequoia beta cycle, and it's still happening in the RC. Not sure if this is Intel only or if it's happening on Apple Silicon macs also. Either way, it's definitely frustrating. It happens most frequently when I'm navigating through items quickly or sometimes even just when I'm typing quickly. The really bad part of this is that if the VoiceOver crash happens enough, it eventually crashes and takes a very long time to come back, if it does at all.

I'm sorry but I really can't be more specific. Frankly sometimes it just seems to happen for no reason at all, but the most frequent crashes seem to happen when I am navigating quickly, i.e. scrolling through the contents of an app very rapidly by using VO+left or right arrows very rapidly, or just left or right arrow rapidly while using quick nav. It happens most frequently when I'm using Safari, but that's the app I use most frequently. I've noticed it in almost every app I use, such as Whats App, Messenger, Discord, Mail, Pages, and any other apps I might use. It even happens while using Feedback Assistant when I'm typing feedback for my most recent crash, so I end up reporting additional crashes in the feedback. During those crashes I'm just typing, but it could be a similar situation with rapid commands since I type at over 100 WPM. Other than this issue I'm actually pretty happy with Sequoia and I think it's one of the best macOS releases for accessibility I've seen in a while. I'd eventually like to switch to an apple silicon MBA but that's a year or two down the road so I've added several updates to my feedback in Feedback Assistant and made sure to gather logs every time to give Apple system data of a couple dozen crashes.

hello,

For those who beta tested, how is the new update so far? I'm mostly curious about stability, has navigation in text improved, for example while editing code or an advanced text document? How is the safari not responding bug now?
If nothing really improved, I'll hold off on updating because of work related reasons, that's why I ask here to get an impression.

I will say that for me, the beta has been very stable. I can't speak to your particular questions about text or coding, because I don't code, and never have need for much word processing apart from jotting down quick notes. I have never experienced SNR as much as a lot of people, but I am also someone who doesn't multi-task much. I'll never have more than one or two apps open at a time, never more than two safari tabs at a time, so my computer doesn't have to juggle nearly as much as most people have open at once. But, I haven't experienced SNR even once, and from reading these forums, most people are not experiencing it, or if they do, it is nowhere near as bad as before. I am glad to be running the beta. I see no reason to delay the update.

When Sonoma was released, the general opinion on here seemed to be that it was a fairly low risk upgrade, but it was a terrible experience for me. So I would really like to hear if there is someone who had a bad experience with Sonoma and can compare the new version. I feel extremely anxious about upgrading even though I've traditionally always been a bit cavalier about it.