I'm done with Safari on MacOS

Mr. Grieves, how is your mouse pointer configured to behave in relation to the VoiceOver cursor? I have it configured to ignore the VoiceOver cursor, and I'm not experiencing this bug. You can check in VoiceOver Utility > Navigation.

Thanks for the suggestion, Tyler. I don't have the mouse set to follow the VO Cursor. If I do set this it fixes the problem but causes other issues, such as not being able to skip between the menus using letters (e.g. typing F for File).

It also doesn't happen if I use down cursor to open the menu.

This only started happening in the latest Sonoma. As far as Mac bugs go, this isn't a big one but it is a tad annoying.

Hi,
Command Option Left, or Right arrow switches through tabs in Chrome.
Also, have you guys made changes in VO Utility for navigation etc that may help? E.g, Under "Web" the setting says, "Always allow keyboard commands to navigate websites," Or under "Navigation" toggaling options like, "Allow cursor wrapping, Mouse pointer Moves VoiceOver cursor" and "Synchronize keyboard focus and VoiceOver cursor," to on/or/off? Hope this hellps. P.S if anybody has RIM installed on there Mac, I'm willing to help out where ever possible. https://getrim.app and if yourr on Windows and need help no probblem either. The only thing with the Mac is having to follow the insttructions in system prefferences to allow/and/enable cirtan settings, but once that's done your good to go. I'm thinking of demoing RIM so people can hear what its like if someone would like.

I thought I'd fire up my old intel mac running Ventura and updated Chrome. The History menu works fine. So either a Sonoma or an Apple Silicon thing. (Well unless one of my VO settings is different)

I never knew Cmd+Opt+left/right would switch tabs. I always use Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab. I see this also works in Safari. Not sure if it will work better than the other way which is always a bit weird and erratic. I'll try to remember to give it a go.

I reported the Menu Bar issue to Apple and they have forwarded it onto the technical team (aka recycle bin). They wanted me to do a video/diagnostic dump but that always takes me ages and I'm not sure this annoys me enough to go through that.

Yes sorry it does happen everywhere - I just mentioned it here because I wondered if Apple had done something to the menu implementation in Sonoma.

For some reason it's never bothered me that I can't use arrow keys in the menu extras bar. I guess you just get used to something.

My guess is that the normal application menu is something that can be accessed via the keyboard without VoiceOver. I can never remember the shortcut for it (VO+M is a lot easier to remember). But I'm not sure you can access menu extras without using a mouse or VoiceOver. As usual I could be wrong.

I wondered if maybe this was caused by the history menu being really, really long - unlike in Safari Chrome has it all in one big list and doesn't go to sub-menus. So I created a new Chrome Profile and now have a history menu with one thing in it. And it still goes crazy. So not that then.

Just weird how it seems to be a Sonoma vs Ventura thing. I didn't think apps had a lot of control over those application menus. Maybe Google are trying to do some weird thing where it dynamically loads the menu items in after you open up the menu and VoiceOver says no.

I am not sure if this is exactly what you guys are discussing, but the issue where you cannot navigate the Extras menu with just arrows exists in macOS Monterey also, possibly earlier versions. 🤷

For those experiencing the repetitive menu bar announcement, are you accessing the menu bar with VO-M or Control F-2? For me, when I press VO-M, "Menu bar" is not repeated, but when I just now tried with Control-F2, it was repeated as others describe.

Regarding not being able to navigate status menus with the left and right arrow keys, this has been the case since OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, released in 2012.

Using VO+M. But if you use VO+left/right when you are in the menu it works. So it only doesn't if you use VO+M and then just arrow left and right on their own.

Ctrl+F2 was the shortcut I was trying to remember before - it works the same as VO+M for me.

It also doesn't repeat Menu Bar if the menus are open (which they will be if mouse pointer following VO cursor) or if typing in a menu to jump to it. Only with left/right arrows.

I saw a toot saying that the problem with big tables in Chrome has now been fixed. And I just gave it a try. And it really is!!

I have noticed a new problem as of this week, however. It's only appearing in Jira. But when I go to the Your Work tab, I can choose between Assigned to Me and Recent. Under this are a list of tickets. I guess they are in a table. Last week it was working fine. This week it just speaks the status of every ticket really quickly in one go and that's it. Works fine in Safari. Not sure if this is related to the above fix or if it's a problem with Jira.

So one step forwards, one step back, but now they have fixed the big tables problem I might be able to start getting a bit more use out of Chrome.

It's working just fine for me. They did a big accessibility push a year or two ago.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/CacheTheWorld

Mind you, I'm not doing complicated tables or anything like that. I generally loathe tables wherever they show up, even on Windows. I guess if somebody has one handy I can try taking a look at one. It would probably be better if you tried it yourself though, I never did get to grips with any screenreader's table navigation commands.

I didn't use Firefox because of any Safari issues either.It's just that i have an account set up with all my bookmarks and such, and it's what I used on Windows. So since it's available, I just started there. I can always import things into Safari later, if I decide to try switching.

That's really interesting. I'm still dabbling in Windows I found there that Firefox is so much nicer to use than Edge. On the Mac side it felt like it had a few quirks with VoiceOver. I remember one time VO went totally quiet for several minutes as I was using it which put me in a total panic and I haven't touched it since. That was probably last year. I might have to give it another try now.

I'd love to know what you make of Sequoia, Paul, as I think we had similar experiences with Sonoma. I'm still intending to wait until Christmas before taking the plunge given how badly my fingers got burned last time.

I gotta say, after I switched from my 2020 Intel to my M3 MacBook pro, I hardly ever experience this bug anymore. I don't know if this has been other people's experience, but for me, the M chips have made it so much better

Hardly ever had SNR on my Intel iMac. I honestly wondered what all the fuss was about. When I got my M2 Pro Max MacBook Pro that’s when I realised why it was such a big deal. At times I got them so often it made the Mac barely usable at all. Last week I went a few days without any then had a few minor ones towards the end of the week and that’s better than it’s been for ages. But no, my experience is definitely not that Apple Silicon has helped with this at all.

Indeed on my m2 pro on ventura and sonoma snr was just horrible and after sonoma 14.2 or so it started slowly to be less worst but it's very much still an issue and happens either you are on the betas or stable. When it happens during class in college when I am actively following the teacher in the online etextbook for example... Well my stress level rises guys :) Apple should be taken accountable for that and many other things with accessibility on mac. And no feedbacks are rarely read about snr.
Speaking of web browsing, slightly off topic, but since when the extension table on wordpress admin panel is not accessible with vo cmd t? Like you have to navigate to the nearest text field or form control like the search extensions, and then navigate to the table by its tab index order after.

Reading these posts, all I can do is shake my head, and be thankful my VR Counselor forced a PC on me for my Certification program. I am, however, happy to see Firefox is alive and well on macOS. It is one of the best browsers on the PC side of the fence, and reader mode is just as good as Safari's is on Mac. 😀

do you know in any of the web browsers mentioned here, Safari ,chrome and Firefox, if there’s a keyboard shortcut that you can use to enable or disabled JavaScript? I’ve been looking for this for a while because it’s tiring going into Safari settings every time I want to enable or disable JavaScript, because some website slow down real bad with JavaScript on, but then some others perform really well with it off,

For Mozilla browsers, check out the extension called Script Switch. For Chromium browsers, check out the extension called Quick JavaScript Switcher And as for Safari? ... I did find this page from Stack Exchange that should do the trick.

SNR is back with 15.2 beta 1. I'm hoping it's merely because things haven't been optimised yet. Aside from that, mac OS 15 has seen, for me at least, a significant improvement, on a macbook air m2.

I can't resist commenting on this one.
Being stuck on one browser is a recipe for problems when dealing with many different sites. Everyone at our workplace has at least three or four browsers they use (and these are sighted people). They need these either because some websites just don't render well enough to be useful, some links or material is not even viewable, or the various web-based GUIs are simply not accessible in some browsers. We even have to use older browsers on some devices; a lot of the various network equipment or interfaces whether they be local or cloud-based just don't work with some browsers, so it's not even blind people who experienct the browser accessibility problem; it's many others. Some people don't know what to do about sites that they have a hard time using and others just try browsers until they find one that works. I've had exactly the same problems using (some sites with safari and for example) Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 or 11 and the amazing thing is that they even had the same problems as the Mac with safari had; this has happened on a number of occasions. So I switch to either firefox or chrome to do the job and generally find that there is usually a way to get things done.

We use Atlassian Jira at work for ticket processing/management and for the longest time the editors they provide when you're putting in comments, or summaries were exceeding unstable in safari; the problems were similar in chrome and firefox. The application provides the editor (when you go to that part of the ticket) and it's an editor written in javascript. Apparently, the problem was in the javascript rendering/processing engines. Other problems are in the crazy complex ways (that differe) even on the same webpages for handling pop-ups and other sorts of selectors or lists. It feels like they have too many people working on the forms/pages and at some point someone put it all together and you get parts that are very accessible and parts that are not. Sections with pop-ups work just as we'd think they should, and yet others on the same page require me to go through the mouse-click-simiulation thing and gain access to them (not always reliably) to fill out or select what I want.

We really need to get use to the idea that not everything is accessible in one browser and adjust our approach to be a bit more flexible, because even my sighted peers have to do that. It has even happened that they had to use older java or javascript engines to gain accessiblity to some older device or to some site that simply refuses to update their code; which think is amazing.

So, on my Mac and windows machines; I have company's default browser, firefox and chrome and if default doesn't get me access then we try the others. If that doesn't work, and you're using an application like atlassian which they pay for at work; then you open a case with the company and get them to do what needs to be done to solve the accessibility troubles; something that we've had to do on a number of occasions.

Brian Borowski

I always used to like having different browsers for different types of tasks when I could see. So I'd have Vivaldi, Opera, Edge, Firefox and Chrome all installed and would flip between them depending on what I was doing. But I don't think it was usually because some sites wouldn't work in one and not the other, I guess it was more like a form of tab management really.

Now on the Mac I have to flip-flop between Chrome and Safari to get things done. My sighted colleague uses Chrome and never has to use anything else.

I've never felt the options on the Mac to be that good. I'm going to try to give Firefox a proper go this week if I can. I had a quick play and it seemed better than I remember it, so hopefully it has caught up. I like how it has its own unique browser engine. I might be wrong, but I think Chromium may have originally been based off WebKit even though they are quite different now.

The browser I loved the most was Opera when it used to use its own Presto engine. It probably wasn't accessible but it was great to use at the time. I felt when it moved to Chromium the browser world had shrunk, so here's hoping Gecko stays around.

I think on the whole Atlassian makes fairly accessible stuff. When you compare Jira to, say, YouTrack by Jetbrains, or BitBucket to GitHub it Atlassian are miles ahead. And they do have a dedicated accessibility portal which is nice, and they sometimes come back with workarounds to problems. I don't have much success with them actually fixing anything though.

I started dabbling with Firefox this week and it is actually not at all bad. I used it to browse some log files in Amazon Web Services, work with tickets in Jira and to review a pull request in Bitbucket and didn't really find any problems. It did keep saying clickable after every line in the pull request which was a tad annoying and Chrome doesn't do. Possibly Safari does.

One thing I find in all browsers on the Mac is that sometimes it makes it weirdly difficult to get focus from the toolbar to the web page. Unless I'm missing something I find the easiest way is navigate by heading from the numpad commander. But sometimes this doesn't work and I need to mess about moving focus around before it works again. Usually going to the address bar fixes it. I did find a few times in Firefox that I struggled to get focus in the web page and had to resort to VO+right a million times to get it there.

It feels to me like VO+J should be the thing that gets me between the different parts of the app, or maybe VO+square brackets to move between windows spots but sadly that doesn't work. I've never understood how this could be so awkward.

But anyway, Firefox coped fine with tables and other awkward controls. It managed to display the recent tickets in Jira which Chrome has stopped being able to do.

I like how you can give bookmarks a keyword, so now I can jump to them by just typing in a couple of letters in the address bar. Maybe Safari and Chrome have this and I've just not noticed.

I'm not sure it's necessarily better than Safari or Chrome, but it feels like a very viable alternative now, so it's definitely something I will keep around. Having a few alternatives has got to be a good thing.

Sorry, Paul, for going off on yet another tangent.

VO-J has been broken in web views since sonoma and I too reported this to apple. You can still use windows spots with the rotor but it's not reliable really.

I always wondered if VO+J was useful almost by accident. If you go to the description it says "go to linked item" which meanas nothing much to me. It doesn't sound like it should do what we all probably want it to do. And because it's a bit ambiguous it's hard to definitively say it is broken. But I used it all the time on Ventura and now don't touch it.

The only place I've found the new behaviour works well is in Spotify weirdly enough. But I always forget about it.

I've never had much luck with Windows Spots. Steven from Double Tap often goes on about how useful they are but it's just not been my experience.

It seems such a silly and basic thing, I'm not sure why it's not easier.

Maybe the best thing to do is to go full screen or try to disable all the random bits of the chrome I don't use.

I used to just go into Full Screen mode with Safari back in the day. However, I have never really used macOS passed Ventura, and my current (and quite decrepit) MacBook Pro is kind of stuck at Monterey. 🤷

Windows has f6 since awhile. Period. :)

I've known about F6 for a long time, since forever in fact. It's possible that you can add that command on Mac with the Command Editor in macOS15, but I haven't tried it. But there's definitely no denying that using a single key for a lot of things in Windows is just nice, and VoiceOver should learn that from Windows, instead of pressing a bunch of keys for something so simple.

I find on the whole using navigate to heading works in Safari and Chrome to get me into the content, but it's not uncommon for me just to get "heading not found" over and over as I try. So unless Apple is trying to make some kind of philosophical comment about my life I think the focus is getting stuck somewhere weird. Almost unconsciously I try various things like jumping to the address bar, then heading nav works again. Sometimes. Or switching apps. I think there has been a longstanding problem with Safari and tabs that I suspect is more system wide. Sometimes Safari will lie about which tab I'm on, or the focus gets stuck in a tab that isn't active and then it can't move about properly.

This sort of thing is constant baggage you carry around when using the Mac - there's always a certain amount of brainpower that has to be devoted to performing all these little hacks.

I actually don't have a problem with the crazy number of buttons you need to press together on the Mac. Maybe it's because I just use the numpad so I don't need to use them that often. But I think if you were to try to use single key nav in addition to these focus problems then who knows what would be happening as you press the keys. I'm yet to be convinced that single key nav is a good thing personally. But I know I'm in a minority here. At any rate, it is an option still.

The Mac definitely does need an F6 equivalent though. That's what I thought VO+J and windows spots were supposed to be. But obviously Apple knows best.

I think I found another way to move to web content when you get stuck in the toolbar. I used this in Firefox and it worked. I think it works in Safari but not yet managed to get stuck there.

Anyway, it's VO+Shift+End to move to the visible end and then you can just navigate by heading as normal. Or Use VO+right to get into the top of the page.

Well, it looks like Firefox has as much trouble with responding as Safari. Still, east least it allows you to more easily switch apps than when Safari does it.

A shame this issue is still going on 5ish years later. 😦

Be My AI would be good here I would imagine. Point your iPhone camera at your computer screen with BME open, and press volume up or volume down to snap a pic and have BME tell you if the page is loaded.

At least, you could eliminate a sluggish website/server in this way. 🙂

The way I see it is that if I get Safari is not Responding for a second or two whilst a web page loads, that's not perfect but it's also not massively disruptive. What I class as a full-blown SNR is when Safari locks up for possibly even minutes and becomes unusable. At this point, cmd+tab won't switch apps and I'm stuck there. The only way I've found of getting to another app is by using VO+D to give the dock focus, then I can switch away as normal. Usually once Safari starts doing this I have to force quit it. I've actually not had this too much recently but sometimes you just get a run where it is constantly broken and it becomes almost impossible to do anything.

The FNRs I've been getting with Firefox are similar to the full-blown SNR in that Firefox becomes totally unusable for maybe minutes. However, at least it's easy to switch away.

I don't think in either case it's necessary to get a sighted person to look at the computer to see what's happening. It is possible that it's something on the web page refusing to load, but whatever the case this behaviour isn't acceptable.

Have you got a page that reliably triggers this? I've been using nothing but Firefox for weeks, the only time I used Safari was to go and get Firefox, and the most I've seen is Firefox is busy for a few seconds. This is on a base 2023 Mac Mini, so M2 with 8 GB, 256 GB SSD, not that that part should matter,but there you are.

I should add that I probably don't use particularly complicated sites. I used to have something similar happen on Windows though, where very occasionally, Firefox would just lock up the whole system. Nothing easily reproduceable and it was just going to standard sites like Youtube. So I could totally see it happening. At least it sounds like it's easier to get out of and you don't have to reboot the whole system. So that's something I guess. That's what I had to do on Windows,and then close the sites quick when I ran Firefox again, on the off chance that they'd cause the same behavior.

That weird little table problem I came across the other day in Chrome where it couldn't read the recent tickets in Jira has suddenly disappeared. Feels unlikely that anyone would fix a VoiceOver issue that quickly but I'll take it.

It's a shame that the History menuy is still all messed up. Other than that I'm struggling to think of a good reason to use Safari over it. Maybe I'll be bravev enough to try Amazon Web Services with it next week.

I have been mostly sticking to Safari except for some work tasks with Chrome, but I had a couple of web sites today that Safari really struggled with. I kept finding the focus jumping up so it would never get to the bottom of the page. Whereas Chrome had no problem at all.

Makes me wonder if I should be following in Paul's footsteps.

I don't expect the issues discussed here to be resolved without the submission of persistent, high-quality bug reports. I rarely get "not responding" messages in Safari or elsewhere these days. However, if it does happen, I generate a sysdiagnose report with Ctrl-Option-Command-Shift-dot.
The bug can then be reported via Feedback Assistant. I'm not sure whether you can still run Feedback Assistant on released versions of MacOS, or whether you need to enroll in the beta program. Apple's Web page is here:
https://support.apple.com/guide/feedback-assistant/intro-to-feedback-assistant-fba2e39e53f5/mac

You should be able to report feedback in shipping versions of Apple software, although Feedback Assistant is somewhat hidden on these builds. To access Feedback Assistant on a shipping version of macOS, either navigate to /system/library/applications/coreservices in Finder and open the app, or enter applefeedback:// in Safari; not sure if that shortcut works on other browsers. For me, after opening Feedback Assistant on a shipping version, an alias to the app appeared in my Utilities folder.

You can just search for Feedback Assistant in Spotlight. When you first go there, you are asked to enrol in the beta programme. Doing this allows you to use the feedback app, and also the option to download beta versions of the software becomes available but you can easily ignore that.

I've only tried submitting something through it once and I never heard anything back so I don't know if it was received or anything. So I've always tended to use the email address because at least I get an answer.

I've become quite bad at submitting log dumps because I can never really remember how to do it, particularly when you are trying to get some work done and SNR is killing your Mac. But the keyboard shortcut sounds helpful and if you can attach it to the feedback assistant directly that is a lot easier than trying to create a share link for the email address.

I think one stark difference between being a sighted computer user and a blind user, is how much of your life can be sucked into reporting all these countless issues. It would be nice to think that maybe I've spent all this money on a computer so it should just work. I lost count of the time I spent trying to get all the bugs from Sonoma reported to Apple and you just think - people get paid for this kind of work, but we have to use up all our free time doing it.

Anyway, enough of my rant. A bug that is reported may or may not get fixed, but a bug that is never reported is never going to be fixed. So it's sound advice.

Hi,
I use Edge on all devices where it is supported & love it!

Don't expect a reply from Apple to MacOS bug reports, even if the bug is fixed. You may get a reply if they want further information from you regarding the report.