What Customizations Have You Made to VoiceOver and macOS?

By Michael Hansen, 3 August, 2025

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi all,

I recently bought a 2025 MacBook Air M4, as I have always been interested in the Mac and the advantages that come with the Apple ecosystem. I have some macOS experience (I own a 2020 M1 MacBook Air that is currently being used full-time to run 2 radio feeds on Broadcastify) and i would rate my level of VoiceOver proficiency as 'beginner-intermediate'. I can get around, do the basics, but I am absolutely not an advanced user by any stretch of the imagination.

With all that in mind, I am wondering what customizations you have made to VoiceOver, and macOS in general, that have improved your experience? As an example, I have set VoiceOver to speak the name of headings before their level and plan to set links to speak the title before announcing the word, "Link."

Thanks,
Michael

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Comments

By Ayub on Sunday, August 3, 2025 - 19:50

I have VoiceOver's focus to synchronize and it works really great.

By Ayub on Sunday, August 3, 2025 - 19:55

I also have VoiceOver speak out links as sounds.

By jim pickens on Sunday, August 3, 2025 - 21:22

Set everything I can to sounds instead of speech, capital letters, links, more content, etc., same on the iPhone. VOCR is a must have, I’ve set group navigation to ignore for most apps except for logic pro and other such complex apps, And synchronized focus between the mouse cursor and voiceover as well as keyboard focus and voiceover. look at the verbocity section of voiceover, you’ll be able to get a lot of bang for your buck with a couple of setting adjustments. I’m still on macOS Sonoma so I haven’t got command customization, but if I were you I would set it to be as similar to NVDA as possible to reduce friction between platforms when switching back-and-forth. One more thing, I added custom pronunciations for all the punctuation I could to make it more similar to NVDA

By Tyler on Sunday, August 3, 2025 - 21:23

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Below is a list of some things I've done to customize VoiceOver to best suit my needs:

Verbosity

  • Change default speech verbosity level to medium
  • Set "While typing speak" to characters
  • Set "When text attributes change" and "when encountering a misspelled word" to "do nothing"
  • Deselected "Speak header when navigating across a table row" checkbox
  • Set "When status text changes under VoiceOver cursor" to "speak text"
  • Set "When progress indicator changes under VoiceOver cursor" to "speak update"
  • Deselected "Speak instructions for using the item in the VoiceOver cursor" checkbox
  • Set "When an item has a help tag" to "do nothing"

Speech

  • Changed voice to Alex
  • Changed speech rate to 60%

Navigation

  • Maintained standard grouping behavior
  • Set mouse pointer to ignore Voiceover cursor

Web

  • Deselected "Speak column and row numbers when navigating web tables" checkbox
  • Selected "Enable live regions" checkbox, created activity to disable them for certain websites
  • Set "While a webpage loads" to "do nothing"

Sound

  • Deselected "Enable audio ducking" checkbox

VoiceOver recognition

  • Selected "Image descriptions" checkbox, focus on an image and press VO-Shift-L to generate a description

In addition, I've created the following custom commands to streamline my workflow and reduce the number of keystrokes needed to perform common tasks:

  • Option-C: Open Calculator
  • Option-D: Open Dictionary
  • Option-E: Open Messages
  • Option-F: Run a shortcut I created to toggle one of my HomeKit accessories, a smart plug, on and off
  • Option-I: Open Microsoft Teams
  • Option-M: Open Mail
  • Option-P: Open Pages
  • Option-S: Open Safari
  • Option-T: Speak the time
  • Option-Y: Open the Text Checker
  • Option-Z: Open Zoom