So I think they are kinda useless since Sonoma while they were actually in the new things voiceover could now do by breaking it before even they are release.
Basically from what I understand in Ventura and below you could only select app and websites (in safari). In 14 they tried to add contexts, things like source code, file system, console, word processing, narrative, social media, messaging...
Well, except for the source code where VO actually switches in XCode, literally nothing else work. Not in pages or other iwork apps, not in messages, not in facetime, not in finder (in all four views) not even in terminal! Like... What sort of non-feature is that? For word processing and narrative, I tried say all and navigating with the rotor by character, word, line, sentence, paragraph, and with vo+arrow keys when interacting in a text field in the most logic first party apps for this to work, but it does just not work at all. And they even had since last September to actually fix them?????
And this was last year. At least this year aside iphone mirroring and the must not be usual but usual list of bugs their new features actually work as expected 99% of the time.
By TheBllindGuy07, 19 December, 2024
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
Contexts
I'd still like an explanation for what all these contexts are supposed to do and where they apply. I just use applications, as those seem to be the most stable.
My point exactly. We seem to…
My point exactly. We seem to be just a marketing product for macos accessibility while iOS still gives actually useful/working feature with incremental improvements.
Explanation
There's no explanation for contexts on iOS either. I tried contacting Apple about it, and all they said was that they'd get back to me once their documentation team had something. I have yet to receive a meaningful response.
Sadly
For all the latest stuff that has been added to iOS activities, there's so much VoiceOver functionality that is missing to make it productive, at least for my needs. 🫤
Activities in Sonoma
The context thing might be something that becomes useful in future. The idea is actually great. For example, if I am coding I want to hear all punctuation in the text editor but not necessarily in all the menus and dialogs. However, I don't know if Apple has actually told us how to attach context to anything. I'm guessing it's like an aria role or something but who knows.
Aside from that, there are 2 things that bug me about activities.
Firstly, if I have an activity trigger by app, then I manually change activity in the app, then it will change until I do something that affects focus, then it switches back to the activity for that app. But then when I switch to another app that doesn't use an activity, I find it is using the one I just manually switched to. That one was new in Sonoma. It's better than the behaviour in the first release but is still annoying. I'd say it is more painful than context switching is helpful, and I suspect this bug is a symptom of the change.
Secondly, custom punctuation sets have never worked for me in a custom activity. This is annoying as I want to set custom punctuation for coding only. Aas far as I know the only way to do it is to use pronunciations which I'd rather not do for punctuation.
But I wouldn't say activities are totally broken to the point of being useless. They are helpful, but as per everything in VoiceOver on the Mac they come with a lot of pain points.