Since I upgraded to MacOS 15.5, when VoiceOver encounters a forward slash ('/'), it announces it as "solidus." This happens regardless of voice. I've encountered this in the Mac Mail app but not elsewhere. When I copy the text in question and paste it into TextEdit, voiceOver announces it as "slash." Same behavior in the AppleVis text box.
Does anyone know why this change was made apparently only to the native Mac Mail client? Clearly, I can add a pronunciation entry. But, for sanity's sake, I'd just like to understand what on earth Apple is thinking.
Comments
I have seen this too in some cases
where I first noticed it was when I named a file with / characters in it in Finder. It happened there too, and like you said, copying the character shows it is a regular / character.
Different text API?
I wonder if the solidus issue is API specific. Mail, Finder, and anything else with the solidus issue is using one text API, and TextEdit, my browser, Scrivener, and anything else that doesn't exhibit this issue is using some other text API. But I have no idea how I would confirm this hypothesis.
Submitting a feedback report.
Can't create a reproducer case
I'm not going to open a feedback report because I wasn't able to reproduce this, not by sending myself an email with the slash character, nor by adding a slash to a file name in Finder. Levi, if you have a way to reproduce it, please open a feedback report. Thanks.
Solidus is actually another name.
I got curious. Apparently it is a name for the slash char. I wonder if it's just one of those things where we call it a number sign usually, but it can be pound or technically an octothorpe, or nowadays hashtag? The "and"sign for instance is called ampersand, at least with Eloquence. So it seems like Apple does sometimes use the more technical names for characters.
Maybe Unicode's falt?
I can't say for certain why the issue exists, but I hypothesize it has something to do with the Unicode character database. For context, Unicode, the standard that allows computers to work seamlessly with text from different languages and scripts, gives names to each and every character, and sure enough, the "/" character appears as "solidus" there. Thus I can conclude that Apple is likely using the Unicode database to retrieve names of unfamiliar characters, and sometimes "/" happens to be one of them.
Maybe you could use the apple email.
accessibility@apple.com solodis might be another word for slash but it's not the everyday word so the common word should be the one that's used so that everyone understands it.
It's a recent change
I've used the MacOS Mail client with VoiceOver for a decade, and never heard the word solidus before last month. Had to look it up. Yes, the word is another name for the forward slash, but that's irrelevant. Something changed in the 15.5 release without explanation. I doubt this change was intentional, because I don't see the issue anywhere other than Mail, and even in Mail, I wasn't able to easily create a message that reproduced the problem.
I'll email accessibility.
Outlook
Well I am glad I had read this post or I would have got really confused discovering a solidus in my outlook. When I interacted with the text and moved to the character on its own, it just said slash. But reading the whole line I Heard solidus.
This is very similar to another problem I have noticed. If I open up Chrome and type in "https://" then the two slashes are spoken as "stroke" But if you go to the page, then go back to the address bar they are converted to slashes. Also if you hear stroke, then interact with the address bar they also convert to slashes.
Also I noticed in hear that if I type a dot it calls it a "full stop" whereas in most other places it is called "period". Every now and again I swear I have heard it called "Dot" which would have been my preference.
Punctuation on the Mac has always felt weird.
I can't seem to find the problem email again. I tried emailing from Apple Mail to Outlook with some slashes and they came out fine. So I don't think it's that Outlook can't speak the slash. It could be contextual. When you tried in Text Edit, did you copy just the slash or the whole email? Sometimes surrounding chars make a difference.
The other thoughts I had were that it could be encoding as suggested above - so make sure Text Edit and the email use the same one. Also you could try Pages instead of Mail to see if it is some formatting around the slash that does it.
If I ever come across it again I will do some more experimentation.
encoding is a reasonable explanation
Except, if it were just a different encoding, it seems like we would've encountered this previously. But I had never heard the word 'solidus' in ten years of VoiceOver usage, and now I've heard it three times in the past month.
I've emailed apple accessibility. I hope others do the same. Even if we can't reproduce the issue, Apple might be able to track down the change that introduced it.
It's quite confusing
The first time I encountered it was in an email that used the phrase "50/50". If VoiceOver had announced this as "fifty slash fifty" or even simply "50 50," I would've understood it immediately. But VoiceOver announced it as "50 solidus 50," which made me wonder what on earth the sender was talking about. This sent me down a rabbit hole from which I have yet to emerge. While the net hit to my productivity is impossible to determine with accuracy, I'll simply point out that I'm typing this comment right now rather than working on a project with a July 15 deadline. Just saying.
you guys need to report this.
even if you're not seeing it, surely you can send apple the link to this thread?
Make a good title and then drop the link in the feedback app, if you have it on mac version 15.5 I'm not sure, the worst they can do is just not reply.
Sorry
On 15.5, in apple mail can't reproduce this. But there are definitely some encoding differences in the address bar in chrome for some symbols but I never bothered to report there cause I knew the reason.
Never had any problem outside chrome or any other app/website. Tested with Alison US and eloquence fr fr. I think it's an edge case. You could try with voiceover recovery mode (you know the new thing in sequoia?) or reseting to defaults after backing up everything, or yet the safe mode just to double check. Assuming you haven't done all this already. Really tried but couldn't reproduce it once on both 15.5 stable and tahoe beta 2.
Thanks for trying
I wish that not being able to reproduce it guaranteed it was gone. But I can't find a way to reproduce it on Sequoia, and I know it's here. If Apple hasn't taken explicit steps to eliminate it, then it's probably still around.
Next time this happens, I'll fire up QT and do a screen recording. If nothing else, it will tell Apple developers that I'm not some madman screaming in the night.
Brad, you're right. I opened a feedback report. Maybe some Apple developer will see it and it will remind them of that single line of code they fiddled with eight months ago.
Possible reproducer case
I've observed the issue again, and have a tip that might help others reproduce it.
The slash character is announced as “solidus” only when using Voiceover navigation (VO+Right and Left Arrow). It is announced as "slash" when using Up and Down Arrow to read the exact same text line-by-line.
Footnote: This isn't the only situation in which the output of text-to-speech varies as a result of navigation style. There is a larger issue here that “solidus” is only a symptom of.
Submitted screen recording to Apple
I made a quicktime screen recording and attached it to my feedback report, clearly showing slash pronounced as solidus when using VO+arrow navigation, and the exact same slash character pronounced as slash when using simple up and down arrow navigation.
I'd like Apple to fix this issue so that slash is always verbalized as slash. But I'd also like Apple to fix the larger issue: have VoiceOver verbalize text consistently regardless of navigation method.
Little issues like this really impact productivity.