I've been banging my head against this for months and I can't tell if I'm missing something or if I'm just trying to ask VoiceOver to do something that it can't.
For background, I describe myself as "mostly blind". I use a screen reader full-time on all of my devices, but I still have some remaining vision. At home I've got a big monitor that I can zoom way into if I absolutely need to read something, but on laptops I'm 100% keyboard.
I'm coming from a Windows background. I dove into Apple Silicon Macbook Pros because of the amazing battery life and havne't been disappointed. From a strictly keyboard perspectie, I've been figuring out VoiceOver and find it fairly comfortable to use (if still a little awkward). Some stuff I really like, such as the VO + U list of rotor objects.
My struggle comes when trying to use it at my desk, hooked up to my desk setup. On Windows, all 3 major screen readers (JAWS, NVDA, Narrator) allow a similar method of using the mouse while the screen reader is enabled. They (mostly) read what's under the mouse pointer, and I use this with NVDA as my primary way of navigating and interacting with the platform.
VoiceOver seems to offer something similar, but with a show-stopping annoyance. I figured that making the VO cursor follow the mouse pointer, so I turned that on. It worked well enough in a single window, but as soon as the mouse entered an app with a window in the background, that app would instantly be pulled forward and focused.
Ok, that's annoying. What about if I change it so the VO cursor doesn't carry system focus along with it? Nope, same deal. Even though the system focus doesn't follow the VO cursor in an active window, as soon as the pointer moves into another applications window the same thing happens -- It's yanked forward to the front and focused.
This is made more aggravating by the fact that I Also use magnification, and MacOS seems to have bizarre mouse acceleration between the active viewing area and the edges of the magnification area. The mouse will move very slow in the zoomed in portion (full-screen magnification) and then move incredibly fast once you reach the border. This almost always ends up triggering the window-yanking described above.
So now I'm at a loss. Is VO just not built for this use-case, or is there some magical configuration I can set to get it to behave the way that I want?
Comments
Yes, you are right. It’s broken.
I’m very similar to you heavy voice over User but I have a little bit of eyesight and I use Zoom to help me figure out where the mouse pointer is. Use VoiceOver for everything else, including reading. I also use the mouse pointer moves voice over cursor.
It’s an extremely annoying design.
Here’s how I work around it.
Mac OS support multiple virtual desktops. You can get to it by pushing three fingers from the bottom to the top on the mouse pad. If you navigate using voice over, you will find the ability to add additional desktops. I usually have about 14 of them. Once I have multiple virtual desktops, I basically maximize an application on every virtual desktop so there’s no two applications in one desktop. One of the annoying problems is that macOS doesn’t have maximize by default so I added a keyboard shortcut under system settings, keyboard that allows me to quickly maximize a window. The menu item that you want to add as a keyboard shortcut is Zoom and I personally assigned command shift Z. Once I focus on the window and I do command shift Z it maximizes. If you prefer an easier solution, you can just keep all the application in full screen, which gets it on desktop in any case. If each desktop has one application, then you can swipe right and left with three fingers on the touchpad to move between applications similar to how you would do that on an iPhone. This works well for me, but yes, I would love for the Apple Accessibility team to stop switching applications when you move out of the window. Good luck. One important thing is that if you do want to use the multi virtual desktops, I suggest you will uncheck the option under system setting that we arranges spaces based on which one is recently used because it’s really confusing and it’s much easier to remember, which app is in which order if the desktops are not rearranged. Also, you can make sure that a specific application always opens in a specific virtual desktop by Wright clicking on the application in the launch bar and under option selecting this desktop.