*Edit* Safari Busy Bug, A practical, and simple work around! 👍🏻

Admittedly, I felt rather skeptical at first when reading the post. I know, sorry @Brian, for the no doubt very gruesome while you must've felt with this incredibly meticulous experiment. I would not have had the patience and courage to have done something even close to this.

Anyway, regardless, I gave it a full committed "go!". And oh boy! Believe it or not, it does work! Really blew me away, to say the least.

However, there are some settings I did not stick to as it would be a deal breaker for me. After experiencing the more or less magical transformation, I went to reverse these following settings. But most importantly, the incredible results remain even after these reversal.

• When encountering a misspelled word: I chose to play sound;

• When reading a capital letter: I chose play tone;

• When deleting text: I chose change pitch. This tone is far too harsh to my ears;

• While a webpage loads: I originally had "Play tone", but switched to do nothing as you suggested;

• For the sound section: I didn't mute the effects, nor did I disable positional audio.

I'm using a Mac Pro running M2 Pro chip. I'm not quite sure if this has any significant relevance to my overwhelmingly positive results, especially with regards to the reversal I made.

So please guys! Export your Voice Over settings in case you need to restore them afterwards, and give this solution a go. At least it was incredibly worthwhile for my case.

Yes, please go work for them right from today @Brian. They'd be a fool if they wouldn't hire you, (if they weren't already haha).
I mean, seriously, despite without disabling sound effects, the difference is significant enough to be a game changer for my end here. I've now done with all my studies, otherwise I could've stress tested it far better with the very quirky and clunky academic webpages and databases.
I will definitely report this incredible finding to Apple Accessibility. Just to make them aware.
Again, thanks so so so much Brian for making my day today, and many days to follow ahead.
/ sent from a gloomy, overcast and rainy but cozy sofa in London 😁.

I'm using a 2013 MacBook Air running Big Sur 11.7.10 and Safari 16.6. Following steps 2 and 3 does indeed seem to make the problem significantly less irritating, though it doesn't eliminate it altogether. I still notice VO being really sluggish on some webpages and the busy busy messages still persist, but they only seem to last for 2 or 3 seconds now instead of up to a minute. I'll report this to Apple, and maybe, just maybe this will help and finally allow them to fix the problem, though I'm not holding my breath.

I gave this a quick go.

Firstly, on my M2 Macbook I setup a Web Browsing Activity to try this on because I was too lazy to make a note o my settings before the changes. I set it up to be used on Safari. After a reboot, I was still getting Safari Not Responding over and over again trying to open the AWS Management Console. This is Sonoma. (I may have mentioned this elsewhere once or twice... cough..)

So I cracked open my iMac running Ventura and changed the Web and Sound options there, but this time not being silly enough to do it in Ventura. After a reboot, opened up AWS Management Console. Safari not responding, safari not responding.

I'm guessing that these changes mean that the Mac uses a tiny amount less processing power on each web page, which may be enough to drop it below the Not Responding threshold. Maybe the AWS Management Console isn't a good example because it's quite complicated. But it is the one showstopper instance of this bug for me.

Or maybe it just needs a less broken version of Macos.

I'l maybe try the other options just in case when I have some more time.

Thanks for posting this, though. If it helps others then that's great, and I think a lot of VoiceOver problems are likely caused by our own specific configurations.

Yes now I have installed Sonoma I do have to wear a hazmat suit at my desk.

I wonder if those web app things could help improve matters at all with any particularly badly behaving sites, as they do seem a little bit sandboxed from the rest of Safari. (And by that I mean at least they don't share cookies etc but that might be it.). I think we know the answer but I might try it sometime.

I have realised that I can break the busy message by using the trackpad. MBA 2020.

As soon as I hear the Safari busy message I flick down on my trackpad which instantly unfreeze Safari.

Trackpad commander is turned on and I have the rotor set to headings.

That was a good idea - I tend to forget about private browsing as I never use it.

Sadly, Safari is still not responding. Which probably means the web app idea isn't going to work either.

Not sure about the trackpad commander idea for me. I navigate by headings straight away with numpad commander which doesn't help but might give it a try.

All these ideas are good though, so they might work for someone or in some cases. As long as you aren't stupid enough to install Sonoma of course. (Face palm)

Just to note, I don't think there's anything special about trackpad. Current release version of Safari seems to take any VoiceOver interaction as an instruction to break out of the deadlock. You can also VO+Command+H, or VO+U, or VO+Right Arrow, and a half second later, Safari snaps out of its catatonic state. However, you should observe that the VoiceOver command you entered was completely ignored. So if you really did want to jump to the first header, you'll need to trackpad swipe down or VO+Command+H a second time.

There's still a bug here. Sighted users access websites almost instantaneously with no contortions or incantations, without having to spend hours in VO Utility trying every available combination of settings.

Has anyone ever written a shortcut for launching a web site from the Safari address bar that does something like this?

Turn off VoiceOver
return to address bar
press enter to launch
wait 5 seconds
turn on voiceOver

I'm guessing that since the sighted don't have a Safari busy problem (if they did, it would have been fixed a long time ago), then the problem is VoiceOver being on when Safari goes to a web site from the address bar. A shortcut along the lines just described might be a single keystroke solution.

Sent Apple Accessibility an email this morning, asking what if anything would stop them from doing a single keystroke shortcut to be included in their next IOS upgrade. I'll let you know if and what they say.

Joy!

Bruce

Hi,

Please give me a few websites so I can at least navigate and see what happens.

I want to see if the issue reproduces.
Thanks

So I'm still getting this for my main problem site (Amazon Web Services) but then I tried it on Windows, got a bit further and NVDA seemed to hang. Turning on Narrator I got a couple of feeble not responding type messages but it's still all a bit locked up. So I think maybe my example isn't the usual cause of the not responding issue.

When Safari does lock up here, it sometimes appear to respond so I'll do something like jump to next heading and VoiceOver will pretty much groan, put its head in its hands and start sobbing at that point.
I guess there are 2 entirely different issues. Firstly, Safari just being a bit slow and rubbish and this problem maybe compounded with VoiceOver. And then Safari being absolutely fine but VoiceOver thinking it's not responding when all is actually well.

After having pretty good luck with jump-to-heading breaking the deadlock, I ran into a Safari-Not-Responding situation recently where jump-to-heading did not break the deadlock. So, worst fear confirmed: there is still no reliable workaround for this issue.