first things first, my intentions of this post is not to start a Mac versus Windows argument. I will not move to Windows because of this.
So I am editing code for my website. I go to Discord, go into the chat and chat with some people. That's fine.
I then go back out and go back into my Terminal. Now to be fair there is a lot of code in this terminal window.
But then VoiceOver decides that it's going to crash. Hard.
Speech? Gone. Sounds? Barely any. Mind you, I completely lack sight, so this is bad. Really, really bad for me.
So I turn voiceover off, like what I usually do because it had crashed before, but not as catastrophically. I tried to turn voiceover back on.
NOTHING!
so i keep on trying, again i have no idea on ware i am in the OS at this point.
but it still doesn't work.
command f 5?
nothing.
tern on voice over in spotlight, cause i thought it was siri?
nothing.
command and power button?
nothing.
so then i restart.
well, i don't i force shutdown the hole dam laptop cause what on earth am i ment to do otherwhise
log back in?
nothing.
tern on voice over.
nothing.
finaly im able to get siri into the chat and shes able to tern voice over back on. with speach.
so, uh. how do i stop this from happening.
do i use a better termonal.
pleas someone, this is insane!
Comments
No issues here
Aside from the usual Terminal quirks, I'm not experiencing any major issues with it and VoiceOver on macOS 27. However VoiceOver is a system service, so when it crashes repeatedly, the system starts delaying its restart for increasingly longer periods of time assuming that's a denial of service attack. I've been locked out of my Macs for minutes because of VoiceOver crashing multiple times in succession before.
update,
ok yea it crashed again, also my computer is getting, like, very, hot. but after it crashed it lost speach, i had to use siri again but it's still running. it's mostly happening, when i try to type, i mean mostly because it sometimes happens when it wasn't me typeing also this was on a fresh new termonal window with barely anything on it, but my code i think is still running so we chill rn i guess.
btw i got voiceover back on so idk
fyi, this is also running a mackbook air m1 with 16gb of ram
TDSR
TDSR is a mac and linux screen reader, written because of VoiceOver's shortcomings in the macOS terminal. it might fix your terminal issues. i wonder if orca in Linux is as well a bad terminal experience, like VoiceOver in macOS?
Re: TDSR
First off, I'll say that I haven't used linux GUI in a very long time. Since june 2022. But seeing that it moves very slowly overall, I think this still applies.
Yes, orca is very bad with terminal in general. For basic commands it will work fine. But start to do anything more complex like use nano and you'll run into trouble sooner or later. These can range to orca getting to tell you a wrong line in nano–yes even on a local machine, to orca simply deciding not to speak at all past a certain number of lines when you scroll down, to it reading the wrong option in a menu, or none of the options.
It is bad all right. Granted, it has been like this for years, mostly because orca's been, well, stuck in a game of lets toss the ball with the folks beind VTE, which is what powers the only sort of terminal orca can read. VTE basically refuses to acknowledge it is their problem to fix and toss the ball back to orca, only for orca to toss it back to VTE and so on. Nothing has been done for years about these problems, all because of this.
That said I agree for using tdsr. It works much, much much better than VO ever will.
Re: TDSR
I'm a regular tdsr user in Mac Terminal.
I suggest tying a keyboard shortcut to the VO Mute Speech command. This lets you mute VO while using TDSR in Terminal, then unmute when you leave. I don't believe mute speech has a default keyboard shortcut, so you have to set this up in VO Utility, Commands.
I also recommend changing the default Terminal window hight to 40 lines, which you can do in Terminal Settings. The reason for this is that the tdsr previous line command works only in the visible window.
To deal with output > 40 lines, I generally clear the Terminal buffer with Command+K, do whatever I need to do that will generate all that output, then command+A Command+C to copy the buffer and Command+V to paste it into TextMate, where I can work with it all I want.
At some point, I'll vibe code a replacement for tdsr that doesn't have the visible window limitation. But until I get around to that, my workarounds are sufficient.
wow,
orca doesn't seem to be a good screen reader from what you are saying. i guess i'll forgo installing asohee Linux for now. ah well, the m 5 SOC isn't supported at this time.