I've noticed lately that when I'm using WhatsApp, particularly when navigating a conversation, like I have someone's conversation window open and I'm navigating messages, it'll randomly open up the reactions menu for me to react to some random message. Does anyone know why this is and how to get it to stop doing that?
It used to be a very seemless experience on the mac, and nowadays, not so much.
Comments
Yes this is a bug
Yeah I am going through this. There are two workarounds: first to use the arrow keys with the VO keys (left option+CTRL). The other one is to navigate with the touchpad swipes.
HTH
Disable mouse following VO cursor
This problem has been manifesting for a while, and the workaround that I found almost immediately was to just stop VoiceOver from moving the mouse in tandem with its own cursor, which can be done on the Navigation pane of VoiceOver Utility. As I understand it, this problem results from Meta changing the behavior of the reactions to trigger when the mouse hovers over the conversation, so preventing VoiceOver from moving the mouse avoids unintentionally trigger those events. Beware that some websites may stop working properly after this change though, since they do expect the mouse to be over any element that is receiving a click event.
I don't use the MacOS version anymore
I stopped using the MacOS version. I use WhatsApp Web ad added it to the dock. It works much better than the desktop app for me.
re: disable mouse
What's the disabeling mouse feature, and if I did this, what websites may not work properly? Could you elaborate a little more on this?
Might just use the touchpad.
Re: re: disable mouse
Disabling mouse following the VoiceOver cursor is an option on the Navigation pane of VoiceOver Utility where you get to choose how VoiceOver behaves in regard to the mouse cursor. By default it's set to make the mouse cursor follow the VoiceOver cursor, which means that the arrow representing the mouse cursor on the screen jumps to wherever the VoiceOver cursor moves, but this behavior can be changed to make the VoiceOver cursor follow the mouse instead, or to make it just ignore the mouse altogether, which is what I'm suggesting.
As for this causing problems with websites, sometimes this problem manifests as buttons simply not working when you press them, the VoiceOver cursor unexpectedly jumping to completely different places on the page when you activate an element, and in the worst case you may even end up getting blocked by anti-bot protections such as CloudFlare's when you attempt to check the "I'm not a robot" checkbox. Re-enabling the default behavior should address these problems since, as I mentioned, they are caused by websites expecting the mouse to be on a control that has just received a mouse click event, however not all problems displaying these symptoms actually stem from this issue.
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Editing to fix the comment subject.
Mouse setting
As of macos 14 or 15, this also affects the behaviour of when we do vo+m to access the menu bar. I don't remember now which does what, but one of the 3 parameter will cause vo to announce, apple menu, for example, and then you can do f to be on the file menu and then entering it with up / down arrow; one of the other two will instead focus the curson on the first element of the menu it enteres on, which is always the first element of the apple menu.
As for the behaviours of websites, wherever there's a mouse over event, like the not so good menu of voip.ms, I'm sure two or all three possible parameters change how we navigate in the submenus.
I find whatsapp on mac very easy to use and unlike many who complain more than they're willing to just learn a new damn interface the new windows version is also very nice to use and actually better than the windows metro one. But this rant is beyond the scope of this thread.