Is it just me or are VO commands not working with a non-US (Latin based) keyboard?

By Rasgueo, 21 November, 2023

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hey guys, I'm a multilingual speaker, and although I use the Mac primarily in English, sometimes I need to do work in another language. However if the keyboard is not set to English, rather to a non-Latin based keyboard such as Cyrillic or Arabic keyboards, the VoiceOver shortcuts for navigation are not working. On Latin based keyboards such as Spanish or German they work without a problem.
This is a serious concern, since I can't always have, and don't want to have the keyboard set to English. Is there a way to fix this and to make the shortcuts work regardless of the keyboard? This works flawlessly with NVDA on windows.
Bonus question, is there a way to more easily change the keyboard? Currently I use CTRL + Space and CTRL + Option + Space but this is too slow and very finnicky with 5 keyboards. They don't seem to change in a particular order but seem to be random.

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Comments

By William Garcia on Friday, November 24, 2023 - 15:29

You're not alone in facing issues with VoiceOver commands on non-Latin keyboards like Cyrillic or Arabic on Mac. These shortcuts are optimized for Latin-based keyboards, which is why they work fine with Spanish or German layouts but not others.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, there's no direct fix in macOS to make VoiceOver fully compatible with all keyboard types. A workaround could be setting up custom shortcuts for each layout, but this can be a bit of a hassle.

I personally think that CTRL + Space and CTRL + Option + Space is your best bet, although it's kinda tricky.

Maybe you can check out some third-party apps? Unfortunately, I don't know any, but maybe someone else does