macOS Sequoia: New Features, Changes, Improvements, and Bugs for Blind and Low Vision Users

I joined this year's public beta program and tested the new version and today I updated my M 1 Mac Mini As well. For me Mac OS Sequoia is a great update. Especially because they resolved the preview and voiceover bugs. But I would like to see Mac Voiceover as improved as it's İOS Counterpart. Sequoia brings voiceover to a more stable situation. Despite this, Apple doesn't give the atention to Mac OS Voiceover as it does with İOS Voiceover. I really like my mac and this new update but as I said, Apple should give more atention to Mac OS Voiceover. Think about this, there are some voiceover features on İOS which Mac OS Voiceover Haven't.

@Cankut Değerli
a few thoughts:
1 if this were a feedback report in my opinion it is incomplete.
It doesn't say what you can do on the iPhone you can't do on the mac.
It doesn't have accompanying feedback numbers.
I would also attach screen recordings of you accomplanishing tasks on your iPhone. I would also turn on the Microphone when recording and state I can no do this task on the Mac and would like to be able to do so.

• Quick Nav ON/OFF sounds seems to be different when set to sounds and toggling with LEFT-RIGHT ARROWS? It's more pronounced and easier to tell the state.
• In Safari, when on a page that has an article, "Reader available" is announced.

In Preview, depending on your position in a page, when you interact down in a paragraph you can't read with vo + arrow keys this paragraph. I discovered this today and am now writing on windows, so will report this and the feedback number asap. Plus there is a weird bug with lists in pdf sometimes, very hard to describe but basically you have to reinteract in the list and replace your cursor on the specific list element you were on...
Mathml content navigation, as detailed in more detail in an entire other post which also has the fb#, is completely broken, as of sequoia rc (I haven't get the update yet, or I am completely misunderstanding something). This is also the case on the latest stable of Sonoma (14.6.1).
iPhone mirroring completely unusable for us: Come on apple, it's the key feature of this update and we can't even use it?
The arrow key behaving weirdly is as much of an annoyance on this version as it previously was, you can find its fb on applevis, going back in 2017 or so.
Unlike some people might think, at least for me, safari does not respond hasn't disappear, it's just very slightly, sometimes, less worst. Lots of fb# with this. And as I will always remind, it's not (1) specific to safari but other browsers as well, and (2) in other apps when there is a lot of processing / big content being displayed. At least they corrected this bug in the license page when updating for example it does not trigger appname does not respond.
Sometimes when downloading a file in safari it's impossible to hear the file/folder the cursor is on in column view, as well as in the file name edit field. Very, very annoying, the best workaround is to get the file path either by typing or option command c on another finder window open and then press command shift g to get the go to window.
The announce groups navigation setting of voiceover has too many bugs to be listed in this current post, although it's my default way of navigating. Not sure if that's related but in imessage when you interact in the message list and your sent message is the last element in the list (whether or not that message is a reply, or there are other messages of you or the other person before that last element( voiceover interact completely down in that message (the level where we can read the text with vo arrows), the workaround for this is to press vo-cmd-h/shift-h to go to a heading, generally delivered or a time.
A nice touch is the addition of a new shortcut and script (vo shift escape I think) to deinteract and go to the top element, in safari in a web page it will place you at the web content level for example.
Voiceover announces again after god knows how many year the element in the doc when you first enter in it with vo-d!
The new calculator does not have this horrible scam of an accessibility for blind user with the system tts. Voiceover however announces everything from the beginning as we type, like 1, then 11, then 11+1... you see? And you still have to be in a very specific zone, this time reachable with tab and shift tab, before left perent and after equals, it's not announced at all by voiceover (as of rc build). So doing sin90 does still take ages despite the request to add keyboard shortcut for such functions being suggested many times, like on windows, or similar mechanisms, so blind people can be as productive with it than sighted ones.
Minor improvements with option left and right arrow and how symbols are announced with voices such as alison, with an added bug that when verbosity rotor is set to announce text attributes, with each character voiceover will do vo-t in the background and reread everything.
Trackpad three fingers scroll gestures are still still horribly recognized.
You can see other bugs / bug corrections on the beta topic of sequoia.
I definitely agree that macos voiceover is more and more........ neglected and bugs and just (the opposite of quality of life) gliches are becoming a real psychological burdun when doing anything on the mac. My speed to go on the dev beta 1 was iPhone mirroring which we are still waiting and I fear we stay like that for an infinite / very long indefinite amount of time, that's how little my trust towards macos accessibility is now. Like the real big feature for them to implement on sequoia was shortcuts!? This is hart breaking. The rest of it was probably worked on by the ios and ipad os team that's why they actually work. 😂😒

Every time I quit an app, voiceover says authentication, and I get stuck in this unknown window. The only way to get away from it is to command tab. This seems to have started after I tried to set my primary voice to personal voice, something that didn't work. VO seems to think I am Samantha for some reason. Might have had nothing to do with that, but it definitely happened for the first time after I quit voiceover utility. And now it does it for everything and I can't get rid of it.

I'm a software engineer who heavily relies on mixed-case words and prefers the Eloquence voice for screen reading. In the past, macOS 13 and 14 had an odd issue where Eloquence did not handle mixed-case words properly (unlike iOS). This caused words like InitializeApplicationEntry to be read incorrectly, which significantly impacted my productivity. I’ve already reported this to Apple.
Can anyone confirm if this issue persists in macOS 15?

When trying to use your personal voice with voiceover on the mac, it uses samantha instead of your personal voice.
I've tried this on 15.1 RC and 15.1 dev beta 3.
Is anyone else having this issue?

Here's Apple's Change Log. There's some interesting stuff in here, including a recovery mode which temporarily starts VoiceOver with the default settings. Maybe Apple is taking VoiceOver seriously again like they should have done a decade ago. Maybe I'll dip my toes back into Mac land one of these years if management changes and they continue this trend.
https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/whats-new-in-voiceover-vo15627/mac

In Sonoma I was able to add widgets to the desktop, but can't anymore. I interact with the widgets list, find the app I want, vo space, then interact with the widgets list for that app, and previously vo space would drag said widget to my desktop. No longer the case. I've also tried drag and drop, and no luck. M1 Macbook Air.

There is what I'd describe as a P1 bug with VoiceOver in Sequoia if you have the Numbers verbosity set to Digits. If you read text containing a digit followed by a punctuation character followed by another digit, then the entire string gets garbled with a lot of nonsensical text-to-speech thrown in. This happens with every English voice. In other words, text like dates, times, and other places where you have punctuation surrounded on both sides by digits will trigger this bug. This does not happen when the Numbers verbosity is set to Words.

Whenever I restart or power on my mac and i'm at the logon screen or in recovery etc, samantha gets used which is a bit annoying but its not a problem. Although I do find it odd. I mean, on ios if I restart etc, the voice I use for voiceover reed, will be used, unless I install a update, in which case the voice will revert back to samantha for a bit. I do have filevault enabled, so maybe that's why, but as said, not a big problem, I got off track. Anyway The thing is... the rate is just, abismally slow, 45%. This happens regardless if I increase the rate to 80%. The next time I restart, go into recovery, boot picker etc; the rate is back down to 45%, anyone know how to fix this so that the rate is at what I set it to I.e, 70% and so that it doesn't revert to 45% every-time I restart my mac etc?

Samantha has always been used in recovery mode since i think ever since Apple Silicon came out.

As for it being used on the login screen, I'm not too sure about that. My login voice is Karen, which I'm fine with.

This was not a feedback to apple, just my overall thoughts about the situation. About features İos Voiceover have and Mac OS Voiceover haven't, for example İOS Voiceover can read the subtitles and you can control this with a rotor action, where as Mac OS Voiceover can not.

For me also personal voice is using samantha.

I avoided the betas this year as I no-longer have secondary devices that I don't rely on. I installed the public releases of iOS 18 and MacOS sequoia last night and the difference is once again striking. iOS 18 is more responsive and generally a pleasure to use, with useful new features. MacOS once again is lagging far behind, with voiceover features from iOS still nowhere to be found. Where is screen recognician for example, or the ability to read subtitles. The lack of accessibility in iPhone mirroring, arguably sequoia's biggest feature, is frustrating especially since having iPhone notifications on the Mac would otherwise be quite useful. Apple need to have a release of MacOS like Snow Leopard was to Leopard, where they ocus solely in fixing bugs, cleaning up code and drasttically improving performance. And as part of that, bring Voiceover on the Mac in line with iOS.

I agree, and I'm running the beaters on my main device. There was a whole circus about it, and I had to reset my computer, which I don't want to talk about, or else I might go way off topic, and then ramble for like 10 minutes, but yeah.

Overall this is one of the most stable ish beaters I've tested. I'm currently testing 15.1.

Remember that nobody asked apple to put these features on ios. Whereas we've been asking for at least real world bug dcorrection for years and it's not there at all. Terminal is broken.

Hi guys, writing from Italy.
When reading the bugs section I found out that there is one in Safari concerning the impossibility to click "Page menu" and "show reader appearance customization" buttons. I am finding an issue performing your workaround. Since I use a Macbook with touchbar, how can I replace vo+cmd+f5?
I also confirm that after installing Sequoia I needed to reconfigure VoiceOver rate, I am now using Eloquence in Reed variant.
Bye!
Barbuz

vo cmd fn 5. Remember all the function keys, and escape, can we emulated with voiceover on and the function key + the number row, 1 to =, and fn tab for escape.
You might wanna use caps lock as your modifier key to prevent any finger injury. Just suggestin :)

When updating to sequoia 15.0 from the latest sonoma 14.7, it's impossible to read the terms of use before disagree button. When interacting and doing vo down arrow just once it triggers system settings does not respond and replace the cursor back to disagree button. This is beyond words.

Impossible to use spell-check in safari or any other web view. The best you can hope is voiceover announcing a word is misspelled, but you can't correct it in that same window. Moreover when trying to navigate by misspelled with the rotor it won't work and the rotor will default to another rotor element and go to that previous/next element (whatever the case is), for me, heading.

In terminal, when you navigate by up or down arrow, voiceover will start reading from the top, which means that if you haven't done anything in .bashrc you will hear the from last login til the your last command output, each time you navigate in your command history with up and down arrow. Calculator being what it is, you will find python to use as a calculator a horrible experience. Guess what? I discovered this in my math class, again!

So while screen mirroring is not accessible, I can report that I do get iPhone notifications read out on the mac, and at least that part works. But yeah they really should have made it work.

When the first Sonoma version came along the comments in here made it sound pretty solid, so I installed it and had a terrible time. Now it's usable but still new bugs persist that have not been fixed.

So I'm wondering, for anyone else who had a bad time with Sonoma - how are you finding this new version? The two big issues mentioned above are the problem with numbers and punctuation which sounds maddening, and the additional problems in terminal. Considering terminal in Sonoma is still not as good as it was in Ventura it sounds like another huge step backwards.

I'm also concerned about the new speech rate option. So I can now only change it by 5 at a time? From time to time I try to bump my speech rate up by a tiny amount to see if I can cope, and I had been hoping to be able to continue with that. But 5 is a big jump either way. What are the new speeds like? I think Ventura changed the speech rates which I really hated. As someone still trying to get to grips with a screen reader then, having to dial back the speed was really demoralising.

Did I read it correctly that they have got rid of commanders and just smooshed all the options together? So is this one enormous table with everything in it? Firstly, this sounds like a nightmare in terms of information overload. I find editing in tables can be a bit unwieldy anyway and having smaller tables at least felt like I was less likely to screw up too much. Does this also mean that you can no longer switch off numpad commander? I use it for almost all my VO commands, but just occasionally it's nice to turn it off so I can actually type numbers on it. Is this still possible?

There is a checkbox that says also control voiceover with numpad, so you could turn it off completely if you wanted to. And there is a key command called toggle numpad key commands on or off, so you could assign whatever shortcut you like. The new way of organising commands is pretty good once you figure out how it works. There are two options, column view, and table view. Don't switch to table view if you value your sanity hehehe. In column view, you have all the command categories like general, navigation, hotspots etc, in the left column. So you arrow down to the one you want, then arrow right to the list of tasks. Arrow down to the one you want then arrow right, and it'll tell you whatever shortcut is assigned. At this point you can either hit command k and press whatever shortcut you like, or click it, and choose from a standard menu/submenu.

I, too, am not able to read the terms. I clicked "Agree" and then immediately got "settings not responding". Do we perhaps have to upgrade to iOS 18 first? I'm happy to do that but just wondering. I attempted twice to upgrade on my M1 MacBook Air, but not happening.

Update: The update/upgrade is now being prepared. Not exactly sure what happened there, but everything seems to be working now.

Thanks for the details. I'm glad you can still toggle numpad for VO on/off.

The way of entering commands sounds useful. But is there also a way to see it the other way around - e.g. see everything assigned to numpad+cmd?

For example, I recently experimented with setting heading nav on numpad so with Cmd+num pad 1, 2, 3 etc it would skip forward by that heading level, then same with Option would go backwards. It was handy to be able to review what was on those commands before committing to this.

Anyway I guess it's not a showstopper. But I don't fancy upgrading with that punctuation/numbers bug.

Why does Apple have such problems with punctuation and text? Nothing would make me happier than if they announced that they were putting all that work in the bin and starting from scratch.

First of all, thanks for your recommendations about function key and so on. Secondly, did you manage to upgrade to Sonoma 14.7 prior to updating to Sequoia? I needed to use double upgrade, and also a friend of mine, because when we found "Sonoma 14.7 and 1 more" it wasn't a button, so trying to click there nothing obvious happened.

Even myself don't know how I did, I had the same thought oh this is not a button. I think you click somewhere on or around it and it opens a popup with 14.7. After you can just hit upgrade for 14.7 to 15.0.

I first hated grid view, I was only using table view and, as you so eloquently put, lost my mind. But yes it's very conveniant after.

When clicking add in braille display settings, and when you interact with the column having the name of your braille display to connect it it will shift focus back on the cancel button. You just re interact with the table (only) and then tab should help you focus on connect button and then just click.
Apple didn't even bother adding the very useful ios equivalent of reconnect braille display as mine disconnected several time from bluetooth. Maybe it's just another bug going on with mathml as I would press one of the routing cursor and then the right pan button (focus blue 40 4th gen) to se e the rest of an equation and it would disconnect both times. Again! In my math class guys! YAY.

Aside the bugs, it's honestly much much much more stable than sonoma. I was so traumatized back then with the caps lock mess. To put into prospective it was the half of my 2nd month with macos then. I let you imagine.

Very simple to enable in fact. Just turn off VO, do again command f5, and after releasing all keys hold shift, voiceover will tell keep holding shift to enter recovery mode (or something like that). In it, the speech settings, the voice, and the keyboard shortcuts are left like your own, but all the behavioural ones like standard vs announce groups mode, etc, those sort of things, are at factory default. I think the verbosity is default too. It's not the same thing as a full reset to default, rather it's very very handy for bug tracking actually in a given ui element. It's just the default skin but your own customization. Very hard to describe in fact you have to try it yourselfe.

Thanks again for your response, as far as you could of course...

Hi guys,
I don't know if I'm using the computer in some special way, but the new trivial errors are driving me crazy:
1. If I have actions assigned to an application or page, and they include options related to voice changes (speed, volume), such changes do not work after activating that action.
2. There is some problem with changing voice parameters using shortcuts (CMD, OPT, CTRL + touchpad).
3. I have cursor wrapping set. When navigating with certain shortcuts like jumping through headers or using the tab key, I reach the end and don't return to the beginning. Quick navigation, however, wraps around.
4. VoiceOver keeps restarting, it happened 3 times while reading this thread. In the VoiceOver settings, it happens frequently.

I've had this system for 30 minutes and it's driving me insane. Really, does no one else have these problems? They don't even appear in this thread. So tell me, what is the problem?

Quote from the other thread on ios:
Now Being a Cursor Doesn't Require Blinking
I'm not referring to a foul-mouthed Scott Davert, but the cursor on the braille display which is represented by dots 7 and 8. Though this isn't a specific setting for braille display users, it impacts the braille experience in the same way it does for those with vision. It is now possible to turn off the blinking cursor. If this is your preference, you can head to Settings>Accessibility>Motion>Prefer Non-Blinking Cursor and turn this off.
This is not true on macos. If I turn off cursor blinking in accessibility --> display, the cursor on my braille display does still insanely blinks. I hoped, I hoped apple would be intelligent and put at least the blinking option for macos (assuming on ios this actually works as described above an in the other thread), or yet the reconnect braille display as a script, but we have none of these.
Have you noticed guys how iphone miroring is the first element in the official what's new and it's not at all compatible with voiceover? If this release doesn't convince the community or Apple that something is very very wrong on macos, then I don't know what will.

I like this idea, but haven't seen it in any options. Any chance we can assign a command to toggle it? That way we can enable/disable as needed.

Well...As previously mentioned here the upgrade finally worked after 3 tries, 3rd try is a charm! I've been playing around a bit and this is yet another very nice release. However, I haven't been able to locate the musical haptic thing. Or did it not make it into the initial release of Sequoia? Also I don't believe I've found any of the new voices but will keep looking. I'm planning to upgrade to iOS 18 tomorrow or Thursday. Nice job once again though Apple!

are only for iPhones.

Is anyone else experiencing a problem with Quick Nav on some websites?
I can't always move heading to heading or link to link. Quick Nav just stops even though it is still toggled on. I need to toggle it off and on again to make it work.
Problem is occurring with quick key navigation and arrow key navigation. Strangely it does not happen on all websites.

Yeah, don't exactly know how they would have done that on the Mac, with no haptic engine in there, no vibrations. I don't think it would be possible.

The mathml bug is so terrible that I again resorted to bring my old hp laptop with a crappy battery life and inexistant heat dissipation in college to be able to work in class. Gonna just find an outlet. That's how terrible it is. Accessibility is a scam on macos.

Nice to hear that it is more stable. Although "aside from the bugs" should really be part of VoiceOver's tagline. There's definitely a great screen reader under there somewhere.

I'm not sure if this is a Voiceover issue related to the update, or an issue with a particular app since updating, but I'm posting it here to be safe.
I updated to Mac OS Sequoia last night. After fighting with Loopback from Rogue Amiba for a while today, I got it to work the way it should. However, I had set a variety of hotspots within loopback for my sanity, as navigating the app can be a lot. Ever since the update, none of my hotspots actually stick. Voiceover will say that it saved hotspot 0, 6, 7, etc. However, when I press those hotspots later, it jumps to a random part of Loopback that is not at all where i set the hotspot. Also, if I press VO+Shift7, for example, it will say saved hotspot 7, even if I press it a second time. It's like the hotspots aren't actually saving for some reason.
Anybody else seeing anything similar or have any explanation for this?
Thanks in advance!!

I find this issue in Loopback itself. However, once the issue occurs in Loopback, my other Hotspots seem to be affected as well. The hotspots in other apps I can fix no problem, but as soon as I try to use a hotspot in Loopback it breaks all of them again. I think it may be a loopback issue directly, but it's weird that it then proceeds to break all of my hotspots regardless of app.

I've noticed if you go thru anything quickly, like a web page, voice over just crashes. It does come back though.

I just discovered something this morning, which is a fix for a longstanding issue. At least it now works properly on one website. I recently checked out http://www.gratefulness.org after several years of inactivity on there, which is now also available by going to http://www.grateful.org . The website went from accessible to inaccessible back to accessible . To cut a long story short, one of the features on that website is eCards, and there is a combobox for choosing the type of card to be sent out. Well...much to my surprise, VoiceOver read aloud instructions for working with said combobox. I followed the spoken prompt and low and behold, it worked. I was using speech at the time, as I spent the night at my parents' place again and didn't want to take along my Braille display. But I'll try to find out how this performs in Braille. Additionally, that was the only website I visited thus far with a combobox, and I have yet to test this out on my iPhone.

I Tried to put one in the code editor area of vscode yesterday and it indeed doesn't seem to work, it would either put in a some random place or on the close buttun and then I had to remove it from the close button. Anyone else experiencing this?
I'd again say that aside some wow bugs some had (see topics on this sites :) ) sequoia is much much more stable at launch than sonoma ever was.