Hi All,
I'm running into long lines of ͏ ͏ in many emails these days. I would really love to tell voiceOver to remain silent whenever encountering ͏ but I don't know how? The MacOS VoiceOver utility speech>pronunciation doesn't allow me to silence ͏. Is there some other way I might be able to keep VoiceOver silent whenever running into ͏?
Thank you!
Bruce
By Bruce Harrell, 30 November, 2024
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
Not the best fix, but ...
Hey Bruce,
It has been a minute since I booted up my old MBP, but if I recall you can have a sound effect play when you come across a hyperlink. I was fairly certain you could have the sound effect be the only feedback VO gives when you encounter said hyperlink.
If that is not the case in macOS, you could go into the voice pronunciation and replace the word, link, with something like a space, which would make VO be silent when navigating links.
Just make sure you can at least set up virbosity to play a sound effect upon encountering a link, otherwise life is gonna be hard for ya.
HTH.
Brian
Thanks, but in Ventura, my verbosity choices for links are low, medium and high, or custom, which I haven't figured out. since when I select it, I haven't found where anything is new on the screen.
Suggestions?
Bruce
\
Monterey
I will have to dig out my old MacBook Pro, and get it charged up, and peek at the options for macOS Monterey. I'll let you know what I find out. Stay tuned ...
Ok here ya go
On my MacBook Pro, running macOS 12.7 Monterey, when I open VO Utility and navigate to Virbosity, there are 5 sub-categories:
(From left to right)
Speech, Braille, Text, Announcement, Hints.
The one you want is, "Text". Here you should find an option labeled Links and Attachments. It is a drop down menu, with 4 options; Speak, Increase Pitch, Play Tone, Do nothing.
Obviously you want, "Play tone".
I should mention that Monterey was the last version of macOS where settings was still called System Preferences. Ventura and later changed the entire interface for settings, so you may have to dig around a bit to find it, but those are the options you want to stop VO from saying the word, "Link", everytine you hit a link.
HTH.
@Brian
Hey Brian, thanks for your help. Appreciated. I've implemented your suggestion, using "tone" instead of "speak" in the text verbosity section of voiceOver utility. Unfortunately, reading the Applevis subject line of my post, which includes ͏, the character I'm trying to silence, VoiceOver reads ͏ loud and clear. Exciting, huh? Smile. I'm now going to restart my computer and see if I still have that problem.
Thank you again, regardless of the outcome.
Bruce
Rebooting didn't help.
Thus, alas, I am still stuck with VoiceOver insisting on vocalizing each and every time it encounters that character, including when the character is repeated 1000 times.
Before you suggest this, please know that the verbosity setting to read repeated characters only 3 times doesn't work with this particular character, and neither does the "tone" setting in VoiceOver utility verbosity text links and attachmebnt. Sigh.
Additional settings
In this case, I assume this is still a link we are dealing with, you could go to Verbosity, Speech, Additional Verbosity settings, and in that table go to the Link section, hit that drop-down menu that should be labeled as "Default", and change it to Custom.
Under Custom, uncheck the box next to Type. That should hopefully resolve the situation.
T'was not to be
Dear Dr. Brian,
Alas, but this latest attempt also failed.
Good ideas, though. Since I'm using Ventura, there probably isn't any benefit to reporting this bug to Apple. I wonder if the latest MacOS has this bug, too.
Joy!
Oh, I might trying the lowest verbosity possible for the mail app, which is where the character most frequently occurs. I'll report back if it works.
Custom Punctuation
If I read your post, I do not hear the character unless I set punctuation to All.
If you open up VO Utility, then go to Verbosity, then the Text tab, check the punctuation level. If this is set to All then change it to Some.
If it's already Some, try changing it to None and see if that helps.
If it does, and assuming you don't want to keep it at None, you can create a custom punctuation group and set that character to ignore.
Bear in mind, custom punctuation groups don't tend to work if you are using activities unless they have finally fixed it in Sequoia.
An alternative would be to go to Speech in VO Utility, then Pronunciations and add a new entry for that symbol and leave the other box blank.
mr grieves
Great ideas. The speech pnctuation dictionary was the first place I tried, and although it accepted my paste of the character in the "from" field, it never implemented silence after I enter a space in the "to field.
As for verbosity text punctuation, I already had it set to some, and after I set it to none, and after I rebooted to see if that make a difference, VoiceOver was still speaking that character.
Btw, that character never appears by itself. It always app[ears in a long line, repeated over and over, particularly in my mail app preview pane. Anyway, the verbosity setting for repeated characters to be repeated 3 times only doesn't work, so I miss out on hearing the email preview that follows that long string of characters. I just don't have the patience to hear the character repeated a thousand times.
Thanks for your suggestions, though.
mr grieves
Great ideas. The speech pnctuation dictionary was the first place I tried, and although it accepted my paste of the character in the "from" field, it never implemented silence after I enter a space in the "to field.
As for verbosity text punctuation, I already had it set to some, and after I set it to none, and after I rebooted to see if that make a difference, VoiceOver was still speaking that character.
Btw, that character never appears by itself. It always app[ears in a long line, repeated over and over, particularly in my mail app preview pane. Anyway, the verbosity setting for repeated characters to be repeated 3 times only doesn't work, so I miss out on hearing the email preview that follows that long string of characters. I just don't have the patience to hear the character repeated a thousand times.
Thanks for your suggestions, though.
mr grieves
Great ideas. The speech pnctuation dictionary was the first place I tried, and although it accepted my paste of the character in the "from" field, it never implemented silence after I enter a space in the "to field.
As for verbosity text punctuation, I already had it set to some, and after I set it to none, and after I rebooted to see if that make a difference, VoiceOver was still speaking that character.
Btw, that character never appears by itself. It always app[ears in a long line, repeated over and over, particularly in my mail app preview pane. Anyway, the verbosity setting for repeated characters to be repeated 3 times only doesn't work, so I miss out on hearing the email preview that follows that long string of characters. I just don't have the patience to hear the character repeated a thousand times.
Thanks for your suggestions, though.
mr grieves
Great ideas. The speech pnctuation dictionary was the first place I tried, and although it accepted my paste of the character in the "from" field, it never implemented silence after I enter a space in the "to field.
As for verbosity text punctuation, I already had it set to some, and after I set it to none, and after I rebooted to see if that make a difference, VoiceOver was still speaking that character.
Btw, that character never appears by itself. It always app[ears in a long line, repeated over and over, particularly in my mail app preview pane. Anyway, the verbosity setting for repeated characters to be repeated 3 times only doesn't work, so I miss out on hearing the email preview that follows that long string of characters. I just don't have the patience to hear the character repeated a thousand times.
Thanks for your suggestions, though.
Sequoia 15.2
This is still a problem in the latest Sequoia 15.2 beta. I copied the character from the initial post and tried using both the pronunciation dictionary and custom punctuation groups, but it doesn't seem to silence it. I'm not entirely sure how punctuation groups work, so it's very possible I'm doing something wrong. I'm going to send this page to Apple Accessibility and hopefully they can take a look. In any case, you'll need to upgrade to Sequoia 15.2 or an even newer release if you want a fix.
Activities
This is a long shot but you haven’t accidentally switched away from the default activity have you? When using mail, press VO+X and make sure the voiceover default is selected.
Probably not but thought it worth a try. Unlike, say, nvda, when you switch to a profile then when you change settings for that profile, with activities you have to go to that activity in VO utility specifically.
No, unfortunately, it's the default activity
I don't know anything about computer language, but for those who possess an interest in such things, I did find this link for our culprit character:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_grapheme_joiner%23:~:text%3DThe%2520combining%2520grapheme%2520joiner%2520(CGJ,character%2520does%2520not%2520join%2520graphemes.&ved=2ahUKEwjj48DC64yKAxXwHjQIHQDhCSUQFnoECBEQAw&usg=AOvVaw2XNoeFUzPmLA-Xi1gKVc42
... and this is why
I do not like any version of macOS currently available, past macOS Monterey. Granted, I have not touched Sequoia, but both Ventura and Sonoma were a nightmare to use (for me).
@Bruce, I am sorry my suggestions did not work for you. They work perfectly for me. Of course that is in Monterey. 🤷🏽♂️