Phantom braces

By mr grieves, 4 December, 2024

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I've been experiencing a really annoying VoiceOver problem for a while now, but thought I would try to reproduce it. Basically, it's another example of VoiceOver inventing punctuation that isn't there. Part of the Apple initiative to ensure I never have the faintest idea what code it is I'm looking at.

It is very specific.

VoiceOver must be set to Full Punctuation and Indentation must play a sound, not be spoken.

There should be two indented lines, the second starting with an opening brace. The line length is important and seemingly the number of syllables in the second is too.

I've reproduced the problem in Text Edit. Copy/paste the following in:

BEGIN
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
{'curious.': curious}
END

Include the BEGIN and END and all line breaks inside. The two lines should start with 12 spaces.

Arrow to the line starting with the left brace and VoiceOver will speak left curly bracket twice even though it's only there once.

But you can stop this happening by doing any of the following:

Remove one character from the line of a
Delete the full stop after the first curious
Replace the full stop with a comma or a letter
Add a line break between the two lines
Remove some characters from the second line.

I think it maybe has something to do with syllables as an exclamation mark instead of the full stop also causes the problem. In my real example I have underscores and whatnot.

I'd be curious to know if anyone else can reproduce this, particularly someone using Sequoia. I've reported it to Apple anyway.

It reminds me of the problem where VoiceOver goes totally nuts trying to read a number in square brackets. For example:

a[0]

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