voiceover and menus in Sequoia

Hi all!
Ever since I upgraded to Mac OS Sequoia, I've noticed something strange.
Any time I press Voiceover M to go to my menu bar, Voiceover is automatically focused in the menu. It used to be that I could press voiceover M, and it would say Menu Bar. Then I could arrow to the right through the menus, then down into the menu I want once I found it. Or, I could hit the letter to navigate to the menu I wanted, then down arrow into it. Now, I'm automatically placed into the apple menu upon hitting Voiceover M. This makes it impossible to navigate menus by letter navigation.
I created a test user on my Mac, and that user's menu navigation was standard. This makes me think that some setting on my primary user is different than the test user. However, I can't possibly think of a setting that would influence this behavior. If anybody has any ideas, I would love to get the previous behavior back.
Thanks in advance!
P.S. I noticed this change after upgrading to sequoia, but it's possible that this has been behaving this way for a while and I just didn't connect it to anything until after the upgrade, so sequoia itself may not directly be the cause.