macOS Sequoia Beta Comprehensive Bugs/Accessibility Issues Thread

If Sequoia includes a change log similar to iOS 18, please post it here. The list in 18 is quite extensive, and I'm curious if macOS has received the same level of attention.

Not to worry! I was actually sort of hoping someone might copy the thread for other platforms. These are important issues we need to keep track of/address.

I thought we could already do such shortcuts using keyboard commander? I've got right option T for the time, right option P for power etc...

I kinda feel we're being sold old rope here.

That feels like a support nightmare to me. I think part of the problem with the Mac is that it is already so crazy flexible that it makes it a lot harder to figure out what is going on.

I did not realise you can have multiple macos versions on different partitions.

Anyway good luck with the beta - I'll be keeping an eye on this with a lot of interest.

Anyway apologies for short tangent - carry on!

Hi there,

Has anyone tried the iPhone mirroring feature yet? I'm curious to find out how accessible it is with VoiceOver

OK. guess I'll try it when it becomes available.

Are there any improvements to eloquence? I hope at some point they fix the higher sample rate.

Ah, so the difference is we can assign different keys, the vo key, to work as a modifier to fire up things we can already do? It's kinda streamlined it into one button press, which should have been there, rather than having to use option on the other side of the space bar...

It's pretty tragic if this is the best mac os accessibility upgrade. I really think mac is a sideline for apple these days.

The idea of being able to have my iPhone on the desktop, however, does sound pretty groovy. I'm wondering if we can use the IOS TV app with all the up next etc, if we can use the far better version of whatsapp on IOS instead of the junk one for mac. If we can now, in fact, use any IOS app that has better accessibility than its mac counterpart, kinda making the mac the inverse of a headless machine, basically a terminal for IOS and, I'd imagine down the line, iPad. If so, that's a very clever move as what we are, in fact doing, is using our mac as a docking system for our portable devices. Neat.

So, in voiceover you can go to commanders, then keobyard, and you can assign a modifier key, option or command I think, and then choose a key and latch it to a shortcut from the shortcuts app, a function of voiceover, a script and so on. Basically, as far as I understand it, just what the new thing does only one can use the Vo modifier key rather than the option or command that one would use otherwise.

It's no greater functionality, just a streamlining of control.

The early versions of Sonoma basically broke VO+X so manually switching activities was practically useless. Now it is better but still a bit broken if you have an app that automatically switches activity.

Basically VO+X changes the default activity now.

So I have Mail and Safari using default VO activity, and PyCharm using a Coding activity.

If I am in Mail and switch to my Slow Down activity it stays locked. If I go to Safari it is still using Slow Down. If I go to PyCharm it switches to Coding. So far this is fine but slightly different to Ventura.

If I am in PyCharm and switch to my Indentation activity (so it speaks indentation as opposed to beeping) and I then change focus in any way - e.g. using VO+left/right, bringing up a dialog or jumping to a panel, then it will switch back to Coding. If I then switch over to Mail or Safari it will still be using the Indentation activity.

So it's a little broken but it works well enough for most things I do so I've never bothered to go back to Apple with it. I think it was caused by the new way to switch activity by context - I guess every time focus changes it checks if it need to change activity.

So not sure if this behaviour has changed again in Sequoia? (It will be a miracle if I have managed to spell that correctly)

You can do all the voiceover actions with the original keyboard commander. I get what your'e saying, but it's a very small and subtle change that brings it in line with IOS shortcuts. My point remains that, if this is the headline voiceover improvement, well, that says a lot. It's nothing new.

I will get on the beta but need some compelling reason to do so. As it stands, without AI, iPhone mirroring or, as I understand it, the proofing and rewriting features active, I would rather struggle on with the failure I already know. I doubt there will be any improvement in voiceover. There hasn't been for the last several years and see it at the end of its lifecycle.

Got to agree with you, this does feel like a pointless feature. But I also think it is a bad idea to change these things. For one, it means if you go to a different Mac then you might find yourself totally unable to use it. But also if you are trying to raise a support ticket or talk to someone else about how to do something, if all the keyboard shortcuts are different it becomes very difficult to reason with. I use numpad commander for everything, but if I am reporting an issue I will always reproduce with the normal VO commands and document it that way. I think it is better to train yourself on the default way of working, but then use the commanders when you want to make things more personal. But maybe that's just me.

While the high level of command customizability could indeed make it difficult for support technicians to respond to VoiceOver-related tickets from users, one thing that could possibly make this easier is the ability to revert to the default command set in VoiceOver Utility > Commands. What I'm not sure of at this point is if after clicking the "Default" radio button, the user can later simply click the "custom" radio button to immediately reenable their customizations, or if they will need to manually reconfigure them. I'd assume clicking a single radio button in VoiceOver Utility wouldn't erase all a user's customizations, but I've not tested this yet.

Yes that will probably work and can be very helpful for trying to narrow down problems that seemingly can't be reproduced anywhere else.

For me personally though it is too much effort - both just adding an extra step to reporting issues and also trying to remember both old and new shortcuts. Just feels like there are better ways to do this sort of thing already. I think I've only setup half of the shortcuts I can assign to numpad commander.

Anyway we'll see - if you are getting benefit out of it then maybe it isn't as useless a feature as I think it is!

A friend installed the beta, and from the little bit I was able to hear, it appears Apple updated the tutorial to match the experience in iOS. If this and the customizable keyboard commands are the only changes, this is very disappointing indeed, but not at all surprising. The tutorial is an example of Apple doing things well, but that's only one example. It doesn't matter. I'm done purchasing products from this company, and will only consider it once the leadership changes for the better, and they start taking accessibility, user choice, and user freedom seriously. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen, but I can hope.

so, when browsing the web, I got this message. "Safari is not responding. Press Control Option Escape to jump out of a busy web page."
Pressing control+option+esc caused vo to stop responding and it came back when I pressed command+tab and jumped to the next app. I assume this feature will get better over time.
And about the setup issue, I saw that after I updated but it hasn't affected me.
P.S., I hate the "Installer Progress has no windows" thing. It is so annoying!

Well at least we get the message that safari is not responding along with the keyboard shortcut to jump out of a busy page. I'm sure it'll improve overtime throughout the beta cycle.

Not mutch else to add really, Mac sounds like it sucks, iPadOS is not mutch better, voiceover is crashing so mutch for me, I get I am on beta 1 but I don’t have high hopes of this being fixt but we will see how it goes throughout the rest of the betas

The IOS beta, compared with previous years, is pretty slick. Yeah, there is some voiceover drop out but a restart fixes it. I'm quite impressed. Voiceover dropping out will be quickly fixed too.

If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that a lot of the macOS Sonoma Trackpad Commander gesture issues are now working in Sequoia?

I am running macOS 15 on my MacBook Air M1. I’m facing voice stuttering issue with eloquence and other voices, speech stopping for no reason, safari not responding, and Yeah, but overall really like it

I encourage all that are running the betas keep reporting the bugs. The more that test and report the better the chance they will get fixed.

Hello,
I notice this forum hasn't seen a post for about a week, and it looks like a good majority of the important stuff has been posted here, but I did the thing you should never do and opted to run the beta on my main device, as for 1, I don't have anything to test with, and for 2, I feel I get a lot more out of it if I use it on a device I use every day, rather than something I might only touch once a week or month. I have a few things to mention from the latest and maybe even earlier betas.

• If you use a Vocaliser Expressive voice like Daniel, your voice still won't read repeated letters if there are four or more. So X X X X X (That had spaces in it) will read as XX. This has been a thing since Sonoma beta 1, and same with iOS 17, and continues to be a problem. I understand Apple trying to make things less spammy, but surely this could be a setting?
• The VoiceOver Utility has been reworked a bit. The speech tab now has a "primary voice" then rotor voices. I notice all the options for having different voices depending on context have disappeared, somebody please explain to me if I have missed something. This also means that automatic language switching, for those who read multi-lingual text, is contained as its own setting now and cannot be changed any other way than through VoiceOver Utility, as far as I can tell anyway. This is currently bugged. As of beta 3, VoiceOVer will respect your voice for the language, but all other settings such as rate and pitch do not change with the text language. I'm not sure if this is meant to be deliberate but I believe it is useful to put this in anyway. If it were deliberate, shouldn't there be a setting that lets us decide whether we want per-voice settings?
• Command assignments. I saw this one was a bit divisive, with people saying that modifying default key bindings had no use. I can see a use for it, but it, well, doesn't work yet. So by default, caps lock and F7 will read the time and date if pressed once. Well, when I hear the time, I would like to hear seconds, which will not happen by default. Thus, I have an applescript that gives the hours, minutes and seconds, just like it should. In theory, you should then be able to remap V O F7 to use that script. However, I don't think that's been sorted yet. Currently you will still get the command unavailable sound, even after a VoiceOver restart. I have not tried a system restart yet. It could also be to do with the fact that the applescript is currently in iCloud. But other than applescripts, it might just be that there are current things that haven't been assigned that you would like to assign to V O + something. Okay, the keyboard commander (Which has now been re-named to option key commands,) or the numpad or trackpad commanders are good, but they could be considered quite limiting, particularly now as we can no longer use option + space bar, or other combinations like that. Just letters, numbers and symbols. Thankfully beta 3 adds compatibility with option + shift + letter or number, not just option + letter or number, but there is still a way to go before I would say it's ready.
• Notifications did not read in beta 2. They do now, but in order to interact with them from the notification centre, you must interact with the notification first. Even stacked ones, you must press V O shift down arrow to interact, then V O space on the content to activate it. V O space without interacting will show details for the notification rather than open it in the app.
• IPhone mirroring does not work at all with VoiceOver. I have written to Apple about this one. They released the ability in beta 2, and for us as VoiceOver users, although there is full keyboard control, the whole point is that the phone should be locked. Unlocking the phone with the keyboard, listening to VoiceOVer, results in the disconnection from the mirroring session owing to the phone having been unlocked. So far, we can't do anything with VoiceOver. I expect this is because of the way the screen is done. It is not physically controlling the phone in the same way that a remote access tool would, it works in a way, I guess like the apple watch mirror on the iPhone. Although, to those who have tried that, you will find that, though it's not perfect, VoiceOver works with that, whereas it doesn't at all on MacOS. I guess we will see how that goes in the future.

I am sorry that this is such a long post, and I hope it is of at least a bit of use for those thinking about using Sequoia. There are some nice new sounds for quicknav and the tutorial now is a lot more modern, with it giving you a single instruction to follow at a time rather than being told about everything at once and then you "practicing" it. But of all the issues that have always been present, such as the awful thing that is MacOS drag and drop, none of that good stuff has been fixed.

I don't know anyone tried it yet but I installed the public beta on my M 1 macbook air, which is my secondery mac and I can confirm that reading pdf is now a delight. Last year, apple was fixed the continous reading bug however voiceover was randomly skiping some text bloks. I sent feedback reports about this and it seems they fixed the bug.

Hi there, Any accessibility status on iPhone Mirroring with VoiceOver? or is it still the same.