Microsoft Word VoiceOver issues on Mac

By elliot2012, 24 May, 2022

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Anyone else experiencing VoiceOver issues with Word on Mac? When I cursor through a document instead of VoiceOver reading line by line as I cursor down it just reads the whole document. Don't know if it's something I've done but I have contacted Apple accessibility and they said they have received similar reports.

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By Adrian Wyka on Friday, May 27, 2022 - 22:36

Yes.
I have had this problem for a long time. I did report but unfortunately they don't do anything about it.

By Wenwei on Friday, May 27, 2022 - 22:36

Yes. I have had this problem for at least two months. None of the text navigation commands work as expected. The only thing I can do is a copy paste to a more accessible word processor.

By Manuel on Friday, May 27, 2022 - 22:36

The subject says it already. I have the same problem with Word currently, and the most recent version provided through the Mac App Store is 16.61. So, when can we expect 16.62 to be released?

By Igna Triay on Friday, May 27, 2022 - 22:36

Is this fixed if you have ms 365?

By The Blind Saddler on Friday, May 27, 2022 - 22:36

I must admit Word on Mac is a funny old beast - I use a Mac full time for work now (mainly coding and web based stuff) and even Excel on the whole is fine, but Word does remain painful to use in my opinion and is one of the few things that stops me really adoring the Mac experience (busy, busy, busy being the other!)

I’ve had a bit of a play around with this, using Word V16.61 and OS V12.4

In a simple document, with quick nav turned off (I nearly always have quick nav off when text editing, probably a bit unusual I know!), left and right arrows do read character by character, but using up and down as the post says, reads the whole doc for me.

With quick nav turned on, character and word navigation works fine for me using up and down arrow, but what is labelled as lines and sentence navigation appear to have the opposite affect - i.e. rota set to lines reads by sentence and rota set to sentence reads by line

By lizhare on Friday, May 27, 2022 - 22:36

Yes, I am still having this problem today. I had it more than a year ago, they fixed it, and a few weeks ago I noticed it happening again. Hopefully they can figure it out quickly, because they had the same problem last year.

By Manuel on Friday, May 27, 2022 - 22:36

In reply to the post regarding MS 365, for me, the issue is there even though I have the MS 365 version of Word. So I think it's not relevant whether you have running MS 365 or the latest bought Word version available. Because of all the issues I'm having with Word, I now mostly use Pages when it comes to text editing and formatting. It works very great with VoiceOver and you can export your documents to DOCX if needed. The only big problem with Pages, though, is that when you open a *.DOCX file, the application always wants to save in its own PAGES-format. So it's impossible to quckly open a document, make a few changes and then press CMD-S to save it.

By Bryan Jones on Friday, May 27, 2022 - 22:36

I just tested this again in Word and Outlook and am not having the issue. If anyone is running the following build or later and still having the issue, I'd be happy to compare VO and/or Office settings, etc., to troubleshoot.
Office 365
MS Word Version 16.62 (22052300)
MacBook Air (M1, 2020)
macOS 12.4