Description
When navigating text using either the up and down arrow keys to move by line, or VO-left and right arrow to move by paragraph, in a wide variety of first and third-party apps, VoiceOver may occasionally skip over entire words in a phrase. Moving VoiceOver focus back to the skipped words causes them to be spoken correctly, making the issue difficult to reliably reproduce.
Comments
Reproduced in system settings
I reproduced this issue while reviewing application keyboard shortcuts. As I arrowed up and down through the table, VoiceOver announced "Ms" when it should have said "Cell two items", so it effectively chopped off the first two words, and the first three letters of the third word. Again, VoiceOver announced it correctly after navigating back to re-read.
Similar issues within DJay app
I thought I was going mad until I read this post that highlighted a similar issue I am having with the DJay app on MacOs.
When scrolling down a list of songs in a playlist, Voiceover will randomly skip over the first few words of the titles.
I believe that these titles are in a table if that helps.
Again, not entirely sure if there's any reason or pattern to when or why this happens, but does seem to be after scrolling down for a while, rarely happens on the first few items in the list.
I'm starting to think it's universal
I think there's a chance you might encounter this bug regardless of the app you're using. I've encountered it with both Finder and MS Word today. It's like one block of text out of every thousand chunks that VO speaks, VO will skip over the initial words or parts of words in that chunk of text.
This is a tough one to reproduce, but I hope Apple takes the time to investigate and eliminate it.