I’m about to open a feedback report. But I thought I’d throw this dog out to the community and see if anyone besides me wants to give it a kick. How many other MacOS users have been bitten by this? How frequently does it happen? Please chime in. I recall Mr. Grieves has ran into this. Others?
If you have MousePointer set to Ignores VoiceOver curser, as many of us do, sometimes it spontaneously and inexplicably switches from Ignores VoiceOver Cursor to Follows VoiceOver Cursor. This setting is in VO Utility, Navigation, Mouse Pointer.
This causes a subtle change in desktop behavior. Typically, the user observes that menu behavior has changed for no apparent reason.
As an example, when Mouse Pointer is set to Ignores VoiceOver Cursor, the system menubar behaves as follows:
* Press Control+F2 or VO+M to move to the menubar.
* Press F. VoiceOver focus jumps to the File menu.
However, when Mouse Pointer spontaneously switches to Follows VoiceOver Cursor, the behavior changes to the following:
* Press Control+F2 or VO+M to move to the menubar.
* Press F. VoiceOver focus jumps to Force Quit on the Apple menu.
Behavior in other app menus also changes. As an example, the context menu in Google Drive becomes unusable when Mouse Pointer is set to Follows VoiceOver cursor.
I don’t know what triggers the change. For years, I have suspected that I’m inadvertently pressing some key combination that changes the Mouse Pointer setting. But as near as I can tell, there is no VoiceOver command to change the Mouse Pointer behavior setting, let alone a keyboard shortcut. My conclusion is that this setting becomes corrupted due to some defect in VoiceOver. But I have never been able to determine a reproducer case. Days go by with everything working normally. Then, one day, menus don’t behave as expected, and I open VO Utility and find that the Mouse Pointer behavior has changed to Follows all by itself. I set it back to Ignores, and everything works fine again.
This might seem like a low priority issue with a trivial workaround. That’s not the case. There is nothing about the change in behavior that would give a blind user any kind of clue about what has gone wrong. Users are at a complete loss as to how to fix it. It impacts productivity dramatically until they stumble onto some AppleVis post that gives them a hint about what has broken.
Comments
Anyone seeing this in Tahoe?
If so, please open a Feedback report against the beta.
The key is VO plus F3 or VO…
The key is VO plus F3 or VO plus shift plus F3, no?
This has nothing to do with VO+Shift+F3
Thanks for the guess.
According to Apple's documentation, VO+Shift+F3 doesn't change the settings in VO Utility. But what we see with this issue is that the VO Utility setting for Mouse Pointer actually changes, and must be changed back.
It's easy to test with the menubar. Set Mouse Pointer to Ignores, use the menubar, and observe the behavior. Then press VO+Shift+F3 and use the menubar again. Same behavior? That's my experience, and I can only conclude that VO+Shift+F3 is not involved.
If you're saying that you can press some key combination that changes the Mouse Pointer pulldown to Follows in VO Utility, I'd love to hear about it. But in ten years of VoiceOver usage, I've never encountered such a shortcut.
VO+F3
I think this changes the behaviour of the text cursor. If I go to VO+H, H and search for mouse, there is a command to toggle this setting but it doesn't seem to have a keyboard shortcut.
I used to have this a lot but haven't for ages.
I was suspicious of the way I was dragging and dropping my Spotify playlists using VO+Shift+F5 to move the mouse pointer to the VO cursor, then VO+Cmd+Shift+Space to handle the mouse down and up. But I could never get it to do it on demand, and it hasn't happened for a long time.
But I do agree that it is annoying. One of those Mac things that just disorientates you for a while until you figure out what is going on. Then at that point you have to try to remember what you wanted to do in the first place!
Out of curiosity, I used VO+H, H to hcange the setting and it actually doesn't speak anything when it does. Whereas most toggles will say "speech on" or whatever. It's not massively helpful.
Lack of a command
VoiceOver seems to offer three types of behavior.
One, The VO cursor moves to follow the mouse. This is what you get by setting Mouse Pointer to Moves VO Cursor. To test if this is on, drag your mouse around the screen and see if this changes the VO cursor location. This might be useful to low vision mouse users who would benefit from some spoken feedback. Mr Grieve, I think this is the command you found in the help menu, toggle VO cursor follows mouse on or off. And I've tried this command, and indeed, when it's on, the VO cursor reads whatever I move my mouse to. And it changes the Mouse Pointer setting in VO Utility to Moves VO Cursor.
Two, The mouse cursor follows the VO cursor. This is what you get by setting Mouse Pointer to Follows VO Cursor. To test if this is on, jump to the menubar and test whether the menus behave like you're hovering over them with the mouse or not, as described in the original post. There is no command that turns this on and no shortcut. The only way to turn this on is in VO Utility.
Three, the mouse and VO cursors aren't synchronized at all. This is the behavior you get by setting Mouse Pointer to Ignores VO Cursor.
It seems to me that there's a design flaw. The VO Utility pulldown menu for Mouse Pointer clearly has three options. I would think there would be a command that cycles through all three options. Instead, we have the command with no keyboard shortcut that gives us the Moves VO Cursor behavior, and we have VO+Shift+F3, whose documentation is confusing at best, but which doesn't affect the mouse and VO cursor synchronization at all, as near as I can tell from my testing, only the text cursor synchronization.
Theory on why no one else is seeing this
This problem could be something unique to me, which has haunted me through multiple releases and multiple hardware upgrades, but affects no one else. I wouldn't be surprised. I see this on my iPhone. I have problems that no one else experiences.
Or this Mouse Pointer issue could be universal, and none of us realize it's happening because we can't see the mouse pointer jhumping around the screen. We simply assume this is the way menus always work.
Perhaps the reason we don't see a flood of comments calling for the resolution of this long-standing issue is that the subject for the thread is wrong. Maybe I should start a new thread asking how to change the behavior of the menubar. If I did, I bet we'd find out pretty quick that most users have Mouse Pointer set to Follows, their menus open automatically, and first key nav takes them to a menu entry rather than a different menu.
That's not a solution for me, Having Mouse Pointer set to Follows VO Cursor makes it impossible to use the context menu / actions menu in Google Drive.
VO+Shift+F3
I had presumed that this toggled the option for the text cursor to follow the VO cursor. But I had a play about with it and it doesn't seem to affect any of the options in VO Utility. Which begs the question - what, if anything, is it actually doing??
The VO+K description for it is confusing as it suggests it changes both the text cursor and mouse pointer behaviour. Certainly it's ambiguous if you use it as I think "cursor tracking" could mean anything.
I wonder if maybe in the distant past there was just a single option to do both things, and then it was later changed to what we have now. But no one thought to change the keyboard shortcut.
Anyway going back to the original post....
The most obvious symptom for me was that it meant you couldn't navigate menus by typing letters. Is that still the case? If so I am certain I would have noticed if it was still happening as it used to drive me crazy.
Lots of topics
Yes, the most obvious symptom that Mouse Pointer has spontaneously switched to Follows VO Cursor is the change in first letter nav menubar behavior. When set to Follows, bringing VO focus to a menu also places the mouse pointer there, and the menu opens, just as if a sighted user had hovered their mouse. That's what makes this issue so difficult to discuss in a forum of primarily blind users, and why it's almost impossible for a blind user to know what's amiss.
As for VO+Shift+F3 not actually changing the VO Utility setting, Apple's own documentation (link above), says this command only changes state temporarily without altering the actual setting. And this is how it appears to work--but only with the text cursor, not with the mouse pointer as the documentation implies. Here's a description of what it does: We're all used to typing into whatever text field has VO focus, right? But what if we wanted to type into one field while using VoiceOver to review some other part of the screen? Just press VO+Shift+F3, then navigate whereever with VO, and your typing would still go into that first text box. Interesting, but it's a feature I've never had occasion to use in 10 years.
It's noteworthy that the Mouse Pointer pulldown has three options, but the unassigned Toggle VoiceOver Cursor Follows Mouse On or Off command is a simple toggle between only two of them (Moves VO Cursor and Ignores VO Cursor). This seems like a design oversight to me. I've opened a Feedback request suggesting they change this command to cycle through all three options. But my real hope is that, while making such a change, they might stumble onto whatever is corrupting this setting and fix it.
I opened a second feedback report concerning the actual bug in which this setting flips by itself. Next time this happens to me, I'll update it, and over time this will create a log of how often the issue occurs. It seems like it happens every few months.
Vo curser synchronization is…
Vo curser synchronization is what insures you can type in text fields with out moving the keyboard focus to them, select items with out having to move keyboard focus, etc. Turning it off decupples system focus and vo, which can be nice with websites which have terrible accessibility and do things like autamatically activate the tab you're focused on, making it so you have to find a way around that element, or when a sight makes the vo curser loop. Basically, when it is off, the vo curser is invisible to the system, unless you perform a voiceover action, vo space, etc, move the system focus to it, etc. It is great for workarounds, terrible for productivity.