I really want to love the iWork suite but...

By TheBlindGuy07, 13 February, 2025

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

So macos sequoia brought the best subtle quality of life updates and patches for VO in numbers, pages and probably keynote. Okay text attributes were broken for a while but in 15.3 they works as normal. I have some problems though, mainly with pages.
Whenever with the arrow keys I go from a page to another, voiceover sometimes, not always but randomly once in a while, de interact of the body area. With the fact that to read by paragraph we have to do vo shift fn up/down arrow or use the rotor because option up/down arrow keys will only read the first and last line of said paragraph, this makes the navigation very very convoluted.
As mentioned a million times voiceover is horrible t managing large document, it crashes constantly whenever I have something bigger than like 30 pages, meaning that for all the bookshare collection of books I have to choose epub where selection across multiple paragraphs or lines is almost impossible, or use word on mac/windows to convert to html.
If I use only vo arrow keys to navigate in the text, whenever the boundary is reached and I have headers and footers shown vo will jump to them and I have once again to do back and forth and interaction cycle nightmare.
Is there any proper documentation about why voiceover displays tables and probably other objects independently of the order they are placed in that page when we read it with up and down arrows for example? Like if I have 20 lines of text, a table (table 1), more text and another table (table 2) chances are that table 1 and to are before the body text and sometimes not even in the right order. I really don't get the logic.
When I have to write headers and footers, left, centre or right, first of all I have to do vo fn shift 4, otherwise the cursor is stuck in the body even if I am at the lowest level in header or footer. Moreover, this one is very hard to describe, but say that I interact with right footer, start writing some text , delete it, return to the body and do vo right arrow from the end of the body text to go to footer, I'd expect to hear footer, group, so then I can interact and choose between the 3 options. But every once in a while it seems that the latest visited element (in this example right footer) is the only thing seen by VO in the same level where I expect to hear footer, group. In sequoia I noticed that jumping to the top level with vo shift escape and then going all the way down eliminates this bug. Or, alternatively, this bug seems to be page specific as if I were to do this in page two and go to page one, there my footers will be announced normally. Reported.
Then obviously there is all this navigation with the find commands which doesn't work all the time, and as I wrote in another post in the vo-u rotor headings are not just what VO would announce having heading text styles.
Even with a 10 pages essay I sometimes hear pages does not respond! And obviously it's impossible to reliably replicate it for bug report.
Audio graphs in numbers are a joke, see a post I made 2-3 months ago about them. Reported.
Math content is not navigable at all you hear the whole thing at once and that's it, tested in pages mainly but I am sure it's everywhere. Reported 3 months ago and 0 patch yet.

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Comments

By Brian on Tuesday, February 18, 2025 - 14:03

This is why layered navigation does not work as well as intended. macOS needs a true flat style of navigation, similar to what we have with iOS.
I know. I know. iOS and macOS are two completely different systems. Still! iOS at least works.
Most of the time.