Problems reading articles using Lire on the Mac

I've been using Lire on the iPhone for a while now and it's a great app. So I thought I'd bite the bullet and buy it on the Mac.

But I'm having trouble actually reading articles. So I select one in the list, then typically uninteract with the message list, move right to the article's web area, then interact. At this point I can start using vo+right to move through the content. Except after I press this a couple of times, focus shoots off into the ether and I need to go start again. It seems that I can never get the full way through an article. Sometimes I can find my way to the bottom of the article and going backwards sometimes is better but the focus always seems to have a funny turn and I can never actually get it to read anything sensibly.

I also tried opening the article as a new tab which was less bad but still unusable. I then tried opening as a new window and just got "loading" and nothing else.

I'm also finding that navigating by heading doesn't seem to work, even though I use it in the ios app a fair bit.

So, go on then. Someone point out the really obvious thing I've forgotten to try. I did find another post on here from a few years ago that was never answered with a similar sounding problem.

Considering how much effort the dev seems to put into accessibility, I am having a hard time believing that this is just a bad app.

The other thing I found - when I am navigating the messages list is that I think pressing M should mark a message as read but it does nothing other than give an irritated little beep at me. I've found that action menu then down goes to a Mark as Read option so it's not a great hardship.