Utility to set Mouse Pointer to Ignores

By PaulMartz, 4 September, 2026

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Github repository:
https://github.com/pmartz/vo-ignore.git

I vibe-coded a small Swift command-line utility that sets VoiceOver’s Mouse Pointer setting to “Ignores VoiceOver Cursor,” regardless of its current state.

Here's exactly what it does: It uses the private ScreenReaderCore framework and SCRCUserDefaults to set SCRConfigurationCursorTrackingMToVO and SCRConfigurationCursorTrackingVOToM to false, synchronizes the settings, then makes an announcement using "say."

You'll need the XCode command line tools. Save the source as vo-ignore.swift and compile it with:
swiftc -O -o vo-ignore vo-ignore.swift

Then run ./vo-ignore whenever you need to force the Mouse Pointer setting back to Ignore. I wrapped it in an AppleScript and associated it with the keyboard commander Option+I shortcut.

This code works for me on Golden Gate. But it relies on a private Apple framework, so there’s no guarantee Apple won’t change or break it in a future macOS release.

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Comments

By Maldalain on Friday, September 4, 2026 - 13:57

It’s so interesting to see developers accomplishing what Apple itself should have done. Clearly, we need to take matters into our own hands to address long-standing issues with VoiceOver.

Paul, I suggest sharing this solution with Apple’s Accessibility team—it might help show them how this issue can finally be resolved.

Thanks again!

By mr grieves on Friday, September 4, 2026 - 14:50

Thanks, Paul.

You just switched on a little lightbulb in my brain and I got Claude to write a couple of little apple scripts for me so I can hear indentation for a single line and make sense of long pascal case words. That was stupidly easy. For some reason I hadn't thought about doing that before. Now to think about what else might be possible.

By PaulMartz on Friday, September 4, 2026 - 15:08

AI is an accessibility breakthrough. Making sense of logging output, coding Objective-C namespace probes, using nm at the command line, This could've taken me weeks; AI does it in seconds.

Still, it takes some guidance. After working on this for a day and a half, ChatGPT was running out of options. Finally, I told it that VO was developed around 2005, and any solution would have to use APIs contemporary to that era. A few exchanges later, we had working code.

By mr grieves on Friday, September 4, 2026 - 15:33

I think AI is amazing for this sort of thing. I would never in a million years be motivated enough to try to learn Apple Script - I have zero interest in it. But to just be able to summon up some magic genie and have it handle all that for me is pretty liberating. There are so many things that used to cause me so much frustration that I can basically ask Claude to take that away. Using my Mac has become so much less annoying since I started doing that. In an ideal world, Apple would just make using Safari and other apps tolerable, but as a plan B it's pretty good.

On the downside, it's probably going to take my job, it's making us all into idiots, tech is now too expensive for any of us to afford and it'll probably destroy the world and everything in it. But you can't have everything. :)

By PaulMartz on Friday, September 4, 2026 - 21:00

Quick update. This is now on github under the MIT license.

Repository:
https://github.com/pmartz/vo-ignore.git

If anyone tries it on a non-Golden Gate MacOS release, I'd be interested to hear whether it works there.