- Positional audio (assuming this is what it's called in English)
- The option to move the carret/insertion point to the character to the right regardless of whether the user navigates text from the beginning towards the end or vice versa, which is also the behavior on Windows
- The chess app and other games, if any
- A customizable welcome message
- Not exactly the same as on MacOS, but an option to choose whether the VoiceOver focus/cursor lands on the "parent" item, the very first item on the screen (often the Back button), or the first window-specific item (items that actually make up the interactable content and come after the Back button, window heading etc.) when going back
There might also be other stuff that I just forgot to add to this list, but these are the ones that I do remember. The last thing on the list may not be clear enough, but I will explain it in more detail in a minute. Suppose you navigate to Settings>Accessibility>VoiceOver, and then go back to Accessibility by double-tapping the Back button or performing a two-finger scrub or whatever gesture assigned to this command. There should be an option whether VoiceOver should focus on the Back button that lets you go back from Accessibility to Settings, the VoiceOver button that is the first on-screen element after the Accessibility heading, or the VoiceOver button (the button selected to go to the previous screen from which you return to Accessibility). By the way, I have corrected so many Turkish mistranslations on iOS, but using VoiceOver on MacOS in Turkish is even more unbearable. I might also consider submitting those to Apple.
Comments
How do you setup number 2 on the mac?
I'm strongly thinking of getting a mac. How do you setup number 2?
setting yo number two and other things
to set up number two, head to VoiceOver Utility>verbosity>anouncements>speak text the curser passes. the Mac does have positional audio, you need headphones to notice it. chess ... I don't see it being ported to iOS. it has a lot of under the hood settings, which require speach APIs, and well, you can have two macs play chess with each other, with different voices, and as chess uses the system voice on macOS, it would require a lot of coding to port that over, and we're dealing with app kit on the mac, and SwiftUI on iOS, which are completely different code bases, thus, would not be werth it from a coding perspective. chesse was around since at least 2003. VoiceOver since 2005, on the mac, and I guarantee you, the softeware engeneers who wrote chess, are not working with apple any more. like, in the snow leopard days, under the late great Steve Jobs ... Gim cook does not have focus like Steve did. if steve were around today ... there would be no mac with m4 pro and m4 pro max. the Airport roters would not have been discontinued, the iPad Pro wouldn't have , existed, max, would not have similarity to iOS, as they do. . so, to get the curser passing to the right is in my personal opinion. is a cop out for windows users. a macs a mac, iOS has it's defaults, get used to it! it drives me crazy when windows users complain about how the mac does things! if you like windows and it's third-[arty screen readers, don't use VoiceOver! have you ever beta tested for apple platforms? there is the feedback assistant app, and you have direct communacation with development teams, through the requests function. yeah, no personal emails, but in my view better than accessibility@apple.com.
What? Responding to me?
Okay, I have almost no experience on MacOS but my OP already implies that I have definitely used the Feedback Assistant app on iOS to submit numerous suggestions and bug reports to Apple, including localization issues. I have listened to some audio tutorials and recently gone through the guide on getting started with Mac here on Applevis, and installed and used MacOS on a virtual machine using VMware primarily for educational purposes (i.e. to familiarize myself with the interface without having to own a Macbook in case I have to use one in the future in a business environment or elsewhere and get used to VoiceOver on MacOS). I do know this might even pose legal issues and wouldn't mention that. I didn't have to, anyway. I'm just being honest with you so that you reconsider your nonsensical attitude. Neither my use of MacOS nor the suggestions I listed in the OP are meant to do any harm. I just wanted to list a few things I noticed and thought could be great if somehow ported to iOS, rather than the other way around (complaining about MacOS and requesting it had certain features found on Windows). Here's another thing that I forgot to mention earlier by the way: The Dictionary app.
Mine? Get rid of the…
Mine? Get rid of the interaction model whenever we are in a web content and I bet you that snr will be drastically reduced... This is what I really hoped iphone mirroring would solve but as you can see this feature is not even worth using for us currently.
I don't think that positional audio (great idea btw) would be such a complicated thing to port to ios, as all the coordinate information are already there as we have the positional control/icon tthing when we just touch the screen and we see the items at the same places sighted people do. It's just a matter of taking thes coordinates and doing some spatialization with binaural/stereo audio.
PS: I know that your topic is the other way around but I couldn't help and post this here still.
Another cool one! The…
Another cool one!
The tutorial we had in ios 18 actually starting on first setup. Seriously apple? VIP buy iphone only because it's reputated to have suggestively better and easier accessibility than android, but switching from ios to android is actually easy because each time I tried one I always get step by step guidance from talkback. Mac does that too but it took them ios 18 and 2024 to even make a tutorial which... I don't understand. My bet is that cause ios is somehow the standard it's easy to ask questions but it's definitely not an excuse.
adatude
I did not know you are a new mac user. I feel now, that you are not doing anything wrong, and running macOS in a virtual machine is perfectly leagel, according to the macOS software license agreement! you feel my adatude is nonsensical, probebly do to ignoris. I am tired of people coming on here, referencing the way windows does things, just don't! yeah, macos has speak text to the right of the curser, but that is not good, iOS speaks the text the curser passwes, which is uniform. it would be an optional feature in verbosity settings, but all this custamization ... ... what do you do when you have to use an iOS device, say, and , custamize the heck out of VoiceOver on the device you use, and custmazations do not synk. in my view, options should be there, but should not be used when starting to learn a new operating system and screen reader. it is better to learn VoiceOver's default way of doing things. if you don't my feer is you will get overwelmed, and shelve the mac. what I did! I learned it 'cause of me crashing my famoilies pc. I don't want you to get discouraged. it would be cool to have what you and others suggested, but speaking from the perspective of having anxiety, you don't wanna fall into stressers related to the mac! I've been a mac user since 2009, and selling my pc and chromebook if i get approval, from government to get it! if that happens, I'm never looking back!
Snr was at its worst when I…
Snr was at its worst when I got my first mac ever on ventura. I couldn't even open my gmail inbox
in standard view in safari or chrome without voiceover always crashing. They improved it slightly now at least since 14.2. It just required David and many others probably sharing it after on HN and what not to pressure apple so they do real work on that.
Daniel Angus MacDonald
I was even accused of haunting the forums as an iPhone user who never posts about MacOS and joins Applevis solely because he uses an iPhone, like many others, to which the moderators did nothing in response, just like they did nothing in response to your weird reaction to my first post. You know, just like ghosts and that kinda stuff I don't believe in. Anyway, so I do know how people have been complaining about MacOS and that I will actually be able to customize the keyboard commands to operate VoiceOver but I will deliberately avoid doing that and instead get used to the default keystrokes. I only suggested the insertion point thing and other stuff as customization options, and I don't see any harm in more customization whatsoever. I do acknowledge that MacOS has its own characteristics and users may just try to get used to them instead of outright complaining. If we all were to use MacOS, then Windows, all the screen readers like NVDA and JAWS, and all the keys like the Windows key and the keyboard commands like pressing Alt to open the menu or Windows+M/Windows+D to go to the Desktop would sound totally unfamiliar to us. Windows users would probably tell us to stop ranting on and on and get used to the OS and its features instead. There's one thing though. Most users do not use MacOS, for a certain reason: If something is counterintuitive and more difficult to grasp and get used to in the very first place even when you know nothing about operating systems, and less convenient to use even after you get used to it, then the majority goes for the easier alternative that offers a smoother experience. You can use a Windows computer and access many of the features without knowing that many screen-reader-specific hotkeys, which does not appear to be the case for MacOS on which the arrow keys, Tab or Enter/Return won't be of much use in many situations. Even a trivial command to go to the next or previous item requires you to press and hold down three keys unless you enable Numpad or arrow key navigation. It's also clear that Apple does not devote that much time and resources to MacOS, as I encountered so many mistranslations while trying to use it in Turkish.
A Video Introducing VoiceOver on OSX 10.4/Tiger
Here's the URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vj90q3rIQ8
I thought the video might be in English but then found out in surprise it was in Turkish. Many of the VoiceOver settings mentioned in this video can now be viewed in Turkish, but the Voices tab is still untranslated. So OSX 10.4/Tiger was the first version that came with VoiceOver, and the Voices tab is but one of the many things still waiting to be translated into Turkish ever since. Just wanted to post about it after mentioning localization issues and encountering that video.
@Enes Deniz
I can confirm the translation problem. It's there everywhere of course but with voiceover on the mac especially I heard many weird things. And now Ameli ca premium and hq has very weird bugs across oses which will probably take awhile to be fixed if they ever are. Visible translation errors aren't not uncommon.
Well...
French shares much more in common with English compared to Turkish, and this might be even more for Canadian French. Sorry, I know only a few words and basic sentence structures so can't say more than that. Still, I conclude I shouldn't be that disappointed and surprised to encounter mistranslations and stuff that has not been translated at all while trying to use MacOS in Turkish. Anyway, here's another video in which you can hear how Fred sounds better on MacOSX 10.4/Tiger compared to MacOS Sequoia (the latest version as of now) in several aspects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRDN7es_ci8
This version should be more understandable at high speaking rates, as syllable lengths are more balanced. On the latest version of iOS, MacOS or whatever OS on which you can use Fred (and the other Apple voices), however, trying to listen to the voice above a certain speed will make you tired trying to decipher the gibberish you hear after a while. In a sense this is even worse than mistranslated or untranslated phrases because at least there's no regression. Fred, on the other hand, appears to have become worse over the years. I would truly have been willing to use the Apple voices instead of Eloquence had I been able to follow what they say at such high speech rates.
Yeah if fred is a voice from…
Yeah if fred is a voice from nuance when we all got that shift downwards with ios 16 and the equivalent macos version. My ipod touch 7 is still on 15 and alison and ameli both sound better. They just updated the tts engine just for the sake of update or something with the licensing but they didn't consider at all how we could be impacted.
What?
This one's inflection sounds even better!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clJ6TZSqhF0
I know, this first version is not as clear, and does not pronounce the phonemes quite right. Hearing that reminded me of the Keynote Gold voice. Still, the inflection getting worse and worse over the years and the voice not being clear enough after four decades is frustrating. Letters like "s" and "z", and phonemes like "th" and "sh" are not really clear enough on the latest versions of the operating systems.
Does anyone remember ...
... when Samantha used to actually be a "good" voice? 😇
Are you talking of before…
Are you talking of before the ios7 era? I was completely in the french back then but I certainly remember tomas becoming disgusting with ios 7+ and I guess it was the same thing with samantha and the other voices?
8 vs 7
I would have said iOS 8, but you might be right about 7. I do remember when both iOS 8, and OS X Yosemite first came out, both were really, really horrible for voiceover users. They did get patched up just before iOS 9, and OS X El Capitan. This was when Apple took on the, "flat look". I cannot really comment on the looks of OSX, or iOS, but I do remember there were a lot of weird VoiceOver issues with both the OS X and iOS of that time.