Every time I select text in Sequoia, I hear VoiceOver announce, "Writing Tools in Action menu." Is there any way to disable that announcement? For 99% of the times that I select text, I'm planning to do something other than run an AI check on my selection, and for the remaining 1%, I can figure it out. The announcement serves only to derail my train of thought and disrupt my workflow.
I already have VoiceOver verbosity set to Low.
Any help would be appreciated.
Comments
Turn off Apple Intelligence
It feels like a sledgehammer solution, but the only way to disable this message seems to be to turn off Apple Intelligence and restart. I'll hope this message goes away in a future Sequoia release.
Still present in 15.1.1
I didn't really expect a security release to address this problem, so no real surprise.
I did take the time to send an email to accessibility@apple.com and ask for help with eliminating this extraneous and distracting announcement. Hopefully they have a solution, or can get the developers to address the problem.
Yes this is indeed…
Yes this is indeed distracting.
Response from apple accessibility
Apple accessibility says: It is possible to disable Writing Tools in the Screen Time settings. Open System Settings and select Screen Time, select Content & Privacy, then turn on Content & Privacy Restrictions. Click Intelligence & Siri, then turn Writing Tools off.
Yes, that works, but ... I thought I made it pretty clear that I was trying to disable the announcement, not the writing tools menu itself. I replied to them and restated my request, specifically asking that this announcement be controlled by general verbosity or speech hints.
Anyone on the MacOS beta, please file a feedback enhancement request to this effect. Thanks.
Feedback Assistant suggestion filed
I filed this as a suggestion in Feedback assistant: FB16064900, asking that this announcement be disabled when VoiceOver verbosity is set to low, or that Apple add a new speech hint toggle to control this announcement.
But the more I think about it, it's a bug. When you select text with VoiceOver enabled, you expect to hear VoiceOver announce the selected text. This announcement suggests to the user that they have selected text that reads "writing tools in action menu."
The workaround is to press VO+F6 to hear what text has actually been selected.
Yoah but for your last point…
Yoah but for your last point, voiceover's been knon to be bad with queuing items and announcing them one by one in order.
How does this work for sighted users?
I'm reviving this thread, as it seems a better place for the discussion than the 15.3 announcement.
I got curious about WTA (writing tools announcement) and how it worked for sighted users. So I brought in my sighted spouse to look over my shoulder at what was happening on screen, because I figured there must be some popup that says "writing tools in action menu," I mean, why would VoiceOver announce it to blind users if there wasn't some corresponding visual signal to sighted users. With my spouse watching, I selected some text. VoiceOver read it, made the new chime sound, then announced "Writing tools in action menu." And we repeated the experiment with VoiceOver disabled.
The interesting thing is what my spouse saw, or, rather, didn't see. Other than the text highlighting that happened as a result of me selecting the text, nothing else changed. There was no popup on the screen telling sighted users that writing tools is in the action menu.
So, here's a plain case where MacOS is treating blind and sighted users very different. To my sighted spouse, this just looks like normal text selection, with no distracting popup or sound effect. In contrast, we VoiceOver users are forced to endure WTA and its corresponding chime every time we select text.
How would sighted users respond if they had to endure some kind of visual popup about writing tools every time they selected text? I'm having a hard time imagining they would be okay with that. So why are blind users being treated differently?
This reminds me of the dreaded paper clip smart assistant back in the early days of Microsoft Office, which became a laughing stock, a poster child for OS manufacturers dumbing down their product and treating their users as if they were imbeciles. And I simply can't fathom why Apple is making this same type of mistake.
If this is true then...
If this is true then...
Not sure what you were going to say.
But I would complete your sentence like this. If this is true, then that means the writing tools announcement is entirely unnecessary.
The stupid thing
So this only happens when a certain threshold of chars or words is selected.
However, writin tools is still in both the action menu and the context menu even if you select less.
so not only is the announcement annoying, it also serves no purpose because the option is always there anyway.
An equally sledgehammer option is to use different apps. I never hear this in PyCharm or BBEdit. But then they aren't putting it in the action menu.
Thanks
Good to know I'm not alone. For me, editing an essay, blog post, short story, or poem is a bit like performing surgery. I've opened my patient, and I have a good idea what's wrong. But, just as I make that critical life-or-death incision with my scalpel, the nurse tells me that my shoelace is untied. But only because I'm blind. They would never say that to a sighted surgeon.
I'm surprised other AppleVis users aren't as outraged as I am. I feel like some kind of mad prophet screaming in the desert.
Is your nurse also dressed like a clown?
And speaking of silly things, is there any way to use VO to just edit out the writing tools in action phrase, so it just doesn't speak that aloud?
Apologies if this is already been beaten like the dead horse that it is.
I have actually tried that
Copying the phrase and creating a pronunciation for nothing doesn’t seem to work.
I thought about making the pronunciation a space, but haven’t tried that yet.
No, and that's pretty much my complaint
It seems that Apple has failed to provide any controls to dampen or mute WTA, even though verbosity and speech hints controls exist for similar announcements. If Apple wants to stop me from beating this dead horse, they could do so easily by making WTA obey my verbosity setting.
If my nurse were dressed like a clown, it would be totally appropriate for this issue.
So again they have a bias…
So again they have a bias for musician blind users as logic is the only first party app to give minimal fine control over VO announcement and they don't bother writing a garageband macos voiceover single page user guide even after exactly 25 years after it was Released and 23 years since VO on the mac.
I cannot remember where this…
I cannot remember where this setting is located. However there is a setting that allows you to adjust the order in which things are recognized with VO. For example, you can have a heading read the content first, followed by the label, followed by the status, or whatever. The point is you can adjust the order, you can also uncheck things so that those remain silent.
I hope this is making sense to you all, because my next question is thus; can you go into that setting, And just uncheck everything for WTA?
no! :) please read carefully…
no! :) please read carefully, it's been said and hinted at multiple times that no we can't, they just created a horrible weird forced exception hardcoded script nobody was asking for in the first place without quantitative data from survey or whatever.
Custom verbosity
You're thinking of custom verbosity in VO Utility. If this announcement were controlled by verbosity, that would be great. I could go in to custom verbosity and turn it off. But it's not.
Sadly, waiting for common-sense changes to custom verbosity is way behind schedule. Years ago, I suggested adding Command+Tab icons to custom verbosity so that a Command+Tab to the Mail icon would announce the number of unread messages even when general verbosity was set to low. Still waiting for that one.
Thanks for trying to find a way to turn this message off. But Apple Accessibility has already told me that the only way to do that is to disallow access to Writing Tools (or turn off Apple Intelligence, as I had already discovered). What I really need now is a lot of people to open feedback requests, or email Tim Cook, or enlist a shaman to cast a spell, whatever it takes to get Apple back to making computers easier to use instead of harder.