Apple Releases macOS Sequoia 15.1; Bringing both Improvements and New Bugs for VoiceOver Users

YAY! I am mentioned as "community". Joke aside, many thanks to apple for having solved the mathml bug so quickly after it was reported. Although the previous workaround existed, I learned about it two weeks after and at that point the impact was such that I was seriously considering putting it on sale as studying was becoming exponentially harder. But for mathjax and its copy as latex feature this period would have been even more difficult. Apple, 11/10 on this one.
As a side note I will again put the emphasis on the importance of reporting accessibility bugs to apple directly through feedback assistant and or accessibility@apple.com. Even more important is the fact to be civilized at every step, even, and especially, if this is a high impact critical bug that negatively impact your life whether as a student or else. The more apple (and any company for that matter) is aware of the real impact of a specific bug, the quicker (relatively) they will be at solving it as shown in this current example.
Thank you for the applevis community as well for having this place where we can share information and find workarounds together.

Since late in the 15.1 beta cycle, the content area of the music app is no longer accessible using voiceover. I've verified that the content is still being displayed using VOCR, but voiceover no longer sees it when interacting with the content area of the app, at least for apple-music content.
FB15498602

Now that vo+n no longer allows VoiceOver to navigate to the notifications area, I wonder if anyone has found a work-around?

Does anyone know if Apple plans on ever introducing screen recognition to macOS? Seems like that would help fix at least some of these kind of issues.

@Brian
I sent a feedback about that last week.

While VoiceOver's notifications menu does not work in this release, notifications can still be viewed in Notification Center (accessed by pressing VO-O).

I have noticed 2 bugs so far:
1. reading word by word is broken. I have tried this in web pages to read using option+right aro, its not working.
2. sometimes keybord help wont get stopped even you press VO K. I need to scrubb trackpad to come out of this.

The word by word on the web in some area of a page was broken already when I got Ventura to my first mac.

So, it seams Mac Voiceover is getting similar to it's IOS counterpart in some areas.
But apple Music and Apple tv home pages navigations are broken and this is a serius bug. I can't navigate thrue my Apple music home page! Are you kidding apple? Other then that, I don't have any show stopper bugs, actually it's getting smoother for me with every release. But this Apple music bug... Really?

Oh I found that keyboard help bug too.
I upgraded from Sonoma 14.6.1 to Sequoia yesterday, and thought I'd have fun with the new VoiceOver tutorial. Then I got to the keyboard help part and couldn't get out for like 20 minutes. I think I pressed the Touch ID button or something and got out of it, but yeah. That was pretty weird.
Otherwise though, that tutorial really is neat.

I updated yesterday, and earlier this morning I put myself on the waiting list for these new AI features. I'm wondering if that means they're slowly being rolled out? In any case, this seems like yet another good update for both my devices. As usual I have yet to play around with everything but it'll be interesting to see the new AI stuff in action. I currently am using an iPhone 14, so will not be able to take advantage of all of it.

Thanks @tyler for the vo+o tip to access notification center. I've gotten so used to vo+n to access the notification menu that I forgot all about vo+o. That said, I'm finding that VO keeps wanting to jump into the widgets grid if I try to navigate through more than one notification. I'm not sure if this is a new bug though, if this has existed for a while, or if I have something else going on that might be specific to my own setup. Either way, thank you for the vo+o tip. I'm sure that will help others as well who may have become dependent on the notification menu.

yeah, I've submitted a bug report to apple about the keyboard-help problem.
FB15603481

Now that I'm finally on 15.1 Sequoia, I'm trying to get some work done in Scrivener. And I've discovered that every time I select some text, VoiceOver announces "Writing tools".

First off, congrats to Apple on making the writing tools available in pretty much any text editor or text field.

Interacting with writing tools is a little odd, however. Okay, if I use the Action menu with VO+Command+Space, then I get the expected options for proofread, rewrite, etc.

But I can also access a writing tools window via the window chooser. When I do this, I'm in a window with one button, and the button is labeled, "affordance." If I'm daring and bold and go ahead and click that, then the normal options for proofread, rewrite, etc., become available.

So what the heck is the affordance button?

But, more importantly, is this just Scrivener acting weird? I don't see this same issue while selecting this text in my comment text field, for example.

Are you able to access writing tools in safari/chrome and pages after selecting text? Because I can't at least via the action menu and I wasn't aware at all that it's also there in window chooser.

Good call. When I select text in this comment box, then open the actions menu, the Writing Tools entry is on the menu. However, attempting to select it results in the thunk sound. I assume that's a bug that will be fixed in a future release.

Yeah I reported it. Same thing for most iwork apps but apple notes 0 problem there strangely. I really feel fed up with this non-sense now of blind users unable to do decent text scrolling with page up/down or equivalent that is actually useful and convenient to use with gpt answers in textedit now.

Here's how I access the writing tools while in a Chrome text box, such as the AppleVis post comment field.

1. Write the comment and select all the text.
2. Open the actions menu. Arrow down to and select the "Show Menu" option. (Do not attempt to select the entry labeled Writing Tools. As we've discussed previously, this does nothing.)
3. A confusing menu opens. If you navigate left or right, VoiceOver announces "Menu." Not very helpful. Instead, up arrow until you get to an option called Writing Tools. Select it.
4. A submenu opens, and it's called Show Writing Tools. Select it.
5. VO+left and right arrow through the writing tools menu to select the rewrite option. Select it.
6. You're now in the rewrite group. Navigate to the Copy button and select it. Do not select the replace button, as this closes the writing tools dialog without actually replacing the text.
7. Paste the copied text to replace your original text.

I tried it on this text. It works, but ultimately I rejected the professional option output because it introduces misinformation, and I rejected the rewrite option output because it destroys the list structure of the post. I didn’t try other options.

A big hurdle for me was figuring out when I needed to up down versus left right, and when arrow keys alone were sufficient versus VO+arrow keys. Finally, just the cumbersome nature of the whole process was problematic. But I did get it to work.

It's a brave new world. Be careful out there.

I don't use Chrome, but in apps I've used, I completely bypass the actions menu and press VO-Shift-M after selecting text to reveal the context menu containing writing tools. Does this not work for som apps, requiring use of the VoiceOver actions menu as opposed to the standard macOS context menu?

Another thing that might work to quickly access writing tools, though I haven't tried this myself, is to assign keyboard shortcuts to them. I'd imagine this would work as they're all in the Edit menu, and have no default shortcuts assigned.

Thanks, tyler.

The context menu in the Mail app is incredibly user-friendly. There’s no need to navigate through a complicated rewrite group. Simply select “Rewrite,” and the message is rewritten effortlessly.

However, this feature is not available in Scrivener. For some inexplicable reason, the AI options don’t appear in the “Writing Tools” submenu of Scrivener’s context menu. This is likely because Scrivener extensively modifies this submenu, including options that are not present in most other applications.

In case it's not obvious, the above was rewritten by AI.

I did it in Chrome. Using Chrome's context menu was much smoother than the actions menu, so, awesome tip. But it's not quite as smooth as Mail. After selecting rewrite, I still had to deal with the rewrite preview group, with options to replace or copy text. But at least it worked.

So how does Sequoia now compare with later Sonoma builds?

It sounds like it has added a few new bugs and not resolved many from Sonoma. Maybe I'm just cynical but I'm feeling that it is being seen as a good release more because it isn't the total disaster that Sonoma was at launch rather than being substantially better.

Is that fair or am I being a little harsh?

I'm thinking in terms of Voicer's performance specifically. I know there are new things like AI which I would like to try, but no feature is likely to be so good that I would forgive a worse VO experience.

I don't think it's cynical at all. If I upgrade, and all goes well with no surprises, then everyone is happy and more productive. My sighted friends tell me *every* MacOS release is smooth for them.

The biggest issue for me so far is some minor incorrect behavior with VoiceOver in Scrivener. The issues I'm seeing are that VoiceOver sometimes fails to read characters or punctuation marks when I arrow through the text. Restarting VoiceOver clears up the problem. I don't see these issues outside of Scrivener. I'll contact their support about this issue. They could probably fix it by rebuilding and releasing a new point version.

VO+J behavior changed in the Mail client in Sonoma, and it has changed again in Sequoia. I give up. I'm slowly adapting to not using VO+J in Mail.

Browsing is a mixed bag. In Safari, VoiceOver announces live regions twice, and this doesn't happen in Chrome. On the other hand, one of my favorite websites broke in Chrome, and it works fine in Safari. Accessible web browsing continues to stymie the world's greatest minds.

I get repeated notifications that I need to enter my password for one of my two email accounts (not my Google account)). I enter the password, send a test email, everything is fine. Next day, same notification.

Time Machine was giving me grief that my external drive had another computer's backups on it. Of course it does, I migrated from that backup, duh. But I had to dig to find the system dialog to tell Time Machine that, yes, I wanted to take ownership of those backups.

So, some flakiness, but everything is minor for the most part.

That seems to back up my theory that it's only a little bit worse than Sonoma.

The problems you describe with Scrivener are one of my main concerns with upgrading. Not that I use it, but any regressions with text editing will likely prove a nightmare. That and the horrible randomness of the web. Do you know if the Chrome issue is definitely Sequoia related and not just because Chrome updated itself?

I feel we hold such low expectations that "slightly worse" seems like a victory whereas I am struggling to think of it that way.

"I feel we hold such low expectations that "slightly worse" seems like a victory whereas I am struggling to think of it that way."
Maybe you're right after all. For me I started on Ventura 13.5 or so as my first mac and macos experience, and well... See all most of my posts from before 2 months ago... Not the best experience. While there are indeed new random bug introduced, the VO modifier keyboard gestures alone are a real game changer for those coming from Windows like me and who have psychological problem with using the numerous commanders as they were called in sonoma and below. For me the huge mathml bug correction is, well, huge, as it will be for other stem students out there as well. Numbers is now less frustrating to use as to edit cell we can do vo space as it should have been the case but which was broken when I first tried on Ventura if I remember correctly. Ncursus interfaces in terminal are actually usable now, maybe they were on sonoma too but terminal despite the latest bug is something I truly started to leverage on sequoia only, and some missinformation on applevis should definitely be corrected as mohamed never has used anything else than the built-in terminal...
When you use option left-right arrow in safari to read text word by word, on new lines now at least the first word is not skipped but the last word from the previous line and the first word from the new line are just concatenated, which is quite an improvement as one missing word tend to change completely the sentence meaning sometimes, and to know that a word was missed we actually have to know that a word was indeed missed... You see? So yeah, they are at least heading towards the right direction with this one. Quality of life improvement in preview although still some problems in nested lists, and this ocr I mentioned on another thread I don't exactly understand how to trigger it but when it does work it's quite awesome. The nstextview bug with pages at least has been corrected but a new one was introduced where now at every arrow movement VO tells the formatting, which can be quite disruptive sometimes. Will report that to Apple soon. Now VO announces the app under focus when you move to the dock, which I never use but this is the first thing I noticed on sequoia dev beta 1. The changed and new voice rotor is quite useful everywhere on ios and macos as now I have two french voices and one english, same thing for braille table input/output which I am sure is quite good for some folks out there. VO recovery mode... could have its usefulness one day probably. The most game changer shortcut though is still that of going out of nested container with vo shift escape. I can just imagine how good this is in xcode for example, or garageband and logic. As of the stable of 15.1 hotspots seem more or less broken?
It's true that apple were more responsive at the beginning of the beta life cycle than they are now, and iphone mirroring with VO is nothing less than a scam for blind users as of writing. Menu bar has some other weirdness as explained on the original sequoia topic by myself I think. I am sure that hotspots are much more annoying for more users I think and I hope they fix this soon. I haven't tried the latest 15.2 beta yet though. GPT integration... Nice start even for VO users.
Again, ios voiceover is much more maintained and getting attention, BSI is awesome, the cursor motion on off control should definitely be ported to macos as it doesn't seem to work that way there, and especially the ability to reconnect bluetooth display. This team is indeed more funded than that of macos which seems to have very very very few engineers. It obvious that they were out of original and actually useful ideas if the main and only real highlight for this release for VO is the shortcuts. They are scared to actually fix their mess of a code. This would have been nothing more than a point update for other screen readers on the market.
Context menu? For VO users the ctrl enter doesn't seem to be that useful plus it is anti the vo shift m everyone is used to already.

If I ever get my hands on another Mac, it's good to know that at least math content now works with VO. I remember my college days, and math was a nightmare to work with.

Anyone remember Mavericks, or Yosemite?

*Shudder*

Do you think the terminal is better because it has been improved or is it just that you have mastered it in its current form?

I don't do anything complicated in terminal - just executing a command and seeing the result. In Ventura this worked reasonably well. In Sonoma it now only tells me the result of a command occasionally. So if I type in "ls" for example, I might have to repeat that three or four times before I hear the list of files. Or I can obviously interact with the shell and go find it but neither is great. Also in either Ventura or Sonoma a bug came in so that I can't use the numpad commander with passwords - it will type in the char not move. So sometimes I have a cheeky prompt asking me for an MFA token that I've not noticed and I am moving around trying to find out what's going on, then I find the prompt and realise I've been putting in loads of stupid characters. Nothing that I would call a showstopper, but just little things that irritate every time I use the terminal.

In Sequoia you mentioned that now the history is broken and you have to use a hack to get it to work which sounds even more annoying.

I thought your comment re commanders was interesting. I have the exact opposite problem. I guess it's about where you start. For me, I don't want to touch the default VO commands because if I move from one Mac to another I want to have a chance of using it in a way I would expect. And if I report a problem I want to list out the steps in a way that works for everyone. But then I see the keyboard and numpad commanders as mine to do with as I please. And I find that quite liberating. I've not been into NVDA's keyboard customisation but I don't really feel like I want to mess with it. NVDA already uses keys all over the place so as far as I know there isn't a section I can call my own without getting my hands dirty and changing up what's already there. So my psychological problem works the other way.

The thing is we really need to be on the latest MacOS versions. I think if I report a Sonoma bug I've got no chance of it being fixed any more. And I also feel that the longer I go without upgrading, the less chance I have of anything being fixed.

Can I ask if there has been any progress with the stupid navigate by headings bug where it won't speak the text of a heading if it has a child element? That one still drives me crazy.

I'd love to just have a second Mac so that I could keep it up to date and report issues as I find them. But it feels like otherwise it's a bit of a leap of faith. I will take it once I am in a position at work to take the risk.

Going back to Paul's comments above, when I had sight I would upgrade the Mac the second a new release came out and I never had an issue. That's why Sonoma was such a shock for me. I miss the days of being able to look forward to a new release rather than dreading it.

In Terminal, I use tdsr. Right after upgrading to Sequoia, I launched it to see if it still worked. Indeed it had broken. It was sporadically speaking at maximum speech rate, sometimes gearing back down to normal rate smack in the middle of reading a line. I thought I'd upgrade to the latest this morning to see if it resolved the issue. Funny thing, though. I can no longer reproduce the problem.

This reminds me of another issue. Starting late in the Sonoma cycle, if you forwarded an email in the Mail client, and if you arrowed through the text, VoiceOver would temporarily jump to maximum speech rate to announce "quote level 1" as it entered the original text. That bug is pleasantly fixed in Sequoia.

I never really stick to tdsr for one simple reason the latest commit message on github is like 2017 and it was more a university research project than anything. I have the same issue with tdsr than with orca, its maintenance is 0 guarantee, at least with nvda we do have such thing. In fact the main showstopper for me with terminal was only ncursus interfaces which weren't working at all even on sonoma, and do on sequoia so for me terminal is indeed slightly better and especially 100% usable for all my sysadmin learning stuff, and works well with vim too. Yeah VO doesn't always announce the output of a command but honestly you can always re read it by yourself and after you get use to it it even gets things quicker for command where you know the expected output. I less use windows for terminal now which was like my first goal all along when I bought the mac, for its unix like shell and all the major benefits coming with it.

For math content it only fixed a small but rather panick triggering bug with VO navigation setting being other than standard. But yeah I wouldn't expect this to be ported back on sonoma because apple has a budget problem allocating real resources to accessibility on the mac, and microsoft is quite the champion of retro compatibility on windows in term of technicalities.

In an earlier post, I mentioned problems with Scrivener in which VoiceOver seems to skip over or omit announcing some text. Now, I'm starting to see similar issues in other apps.

While reading a news article in Safari reader view, I have noticed that VoiceOver sometimes omits reading the anchor text for links, or sometimes skips the first two or three words of a paragraph. If I navigate back to re-read the text, VoiceOver announces it correctly.

In the Mail app, with a message open in a window, as I down arrow through each line of message body text, occasionally VoiceOver omits an entire line. Again, if I arrow back, VoiceOver announces it correctly.

There is no reproducer case for this issue. It's intermittant. But i'd like to know if others are seeing the same behavior.