Mouse Pointer spontaneously changes to Follow VO Cursor

If so, please open a Feedback report against the beta.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks, Jim. I understand why you might or might not want the text and VO cursors synchronized, or the mouse and VO cursors synchronized, and that you might want VO in command with the other cursors following, or you might want the other cursors in command with VO following. But Apple's existing implementation and documentation don't quite make it clear how to fully control this, and why setting it one way -- or another, or another -- would be useful. It would be nice if they would revisit this functionality to make it clearer and easier to control. (And while they're in the code, if they took a crack at fixing my setting corruption bug, I wouldn't complain.)

With two feedback reports open and a commitment to update them in the future, I think I've done all I can, and it's now up to Apple. Though I wonder if I should open a third feedback report about VO+Shift+F3 having no affect on the mouse pointer, in contradiction to Apple's own documentation.

Here's the link to their documentation again. See the section called Turn Off Cursor Tracking, which tells you to turn off keyboard synchronization and set Mouse Pointer to Ignores VO Cursor. Right after that, it says the following:

To temporarily turn cursor tracking on or off while you’re working, press VO-Shift-F3.

It's right there in the same section that talks about turning off both keyboard and mouse synchronization, so I think the only reasonable way to read this is that it is intended to toggle both. Otherwise it would specify which it works with and which it doesn't.

This just happened again, less than a month since the last time. I generated a sysdiagnose with VO+Command+Shift+Period and updated my Feedback report. Then I opened VO Utility and set it back to Ignores.

Just happened December 30 after a fairly long day of Mac use. I was literally just about to shut down my computer for the night, and suddenly noticed the menus not responding correctly to first letter navigation. Sure enough, the mouse setting had flipped all by itself.

I was really hoping that setting up Golden Gate as a new Mac would drive a stake through the heart of this bug. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

I always have VO Utility > Navigation > Mouse Pointer set to Ignores VoiceOver Cursor. But, just today, after about a week of dedicated Golden Gate usage, the setting spontaneously flipped to Follows VoiceOver Cursor.

And in Golden Gate, once it's in that state, most menus become inoperable, including the Navigation > Mouse Pointer menu required to restore the setting. I had to bring in a sighted spouse to open that menu for me, and I had to disable VoiceOver before she was able to do so.

I updated my feedback report, but I don't know what it's going to take for Apple to fix this one.

The menu has three options that control how the VoiceOver cursor and mouse pointer effect each other.

First option: Ignores VoiceOver Cursor. When this option is set, the VoiceOver cursor and mouse pointer move independently. Changing one doesn't change the other. This is what I use as a totally blind person.

Second option: Follows VoiceOver Cursor. When this option is set, changing the VoiceOver cursor (with VO+arrow keys, jumping by heading, or whatever) moves the mouse pointer. Like Khomus said, you might want this on if you use VOCR, or for any situation where you always want the mouse pointer centered on the VoiceOver cursor. I don't know. I never use it.

Third option: Moves VoiceOver Cursor. When this option is set, moving the mouse moves the VoiceOver cursor. I imagine this might be useful if you're low vision, dyslexic, or reading-impaired; you can see well enough to move a mouse but not well enough to read the text. So you would drag the mouse to some text that you see, and VoiceOver would read it.

And the bug, just to be clear: I always have this menu set to Ignores VoiceOver cursor. But it spontaneously changes to Follows VO Cursor. In Tahoe and before, when this happens, it would subtly change the behavior of the entire VO desktop user interface. And now in Golden Gate, it actually renders menus unusable. So anyone who actually uses Follows VO Cursor might want to file a Feedback Assistant report, otherwise VO menu navigation will be broken.

Yeah, as discussed above in this way-too-long thread, I have a Feedback Assistant issue open on the fact that the GUI menu has three options: Ignores, Follows, and Moves, but the associated keyboard shortcut VO+Shift+F3 only toggles between Ignores and Moves.

Still, Mr Grieves, that's a good observation: If this setting ever spontaneously changes to Follows and leaves my Golden Gate system unusable, I should be able to use that keyboard shortcut to restore my system to a usable state.

I emailed accessibility, begging them to have a developer investigate this issue prior to Golden Gate.

Although we still don't have a reproducer case for the spontaneous change, we do have a reproducer case for unusable menus in Golden Gate:
1. Turn on VoiceOver
2. In VO Utility > Navigation, set Mouse Pointer to Follows VoiceOver Cursor.
3. Open the Apple menu and attempt to up and down arrow through the options.

Observed behavior: You can't.

Hopefully, this will get someone's attention.

Thanks Tyler and Mr Grieves. I appreciate the workarounds.

Tyler, I confirmed VO+Up/Down Arrow navigates when Follows is selected. So Golden Gate only breaks normal arrow navigation and first-letter nav.

Thanks, Mr Grieves, for suggesting the VO+Shift+F3 workaround.

In Golden Gate, this shortcut appears to actually change the VO Utility Mouse Pointer menu. That's huge. If this value ever spontaneously corrupts to Follows, I can press VO+Shift+F3 twice. First time sets it to Moves, second time to Ignores. And I no longer have to go into VO Utility to make that change permanent.