A Question About VoiceOver on Sierra

By Mustafa Dogus, 5 December, 2016

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

VoiceOver still responds late on some situations, especially when switching a window to another window, on Sierra, like on El Capitan. It makes my works so slow. Is there anything to solve the problem?

Regards
Mustafa

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Comments

By Ekaj on Thursday, December 15, 2016 - 21:49

Which type of Mac do you have, and if you have one of the MacBooks how much battery charge is left on it? You can find this out by going into Menu Extras with either VO-M twice or Control-F8 and then arrowing to Battery. Or if you have a hotkey set up for this purpose that'll work too. That's all I can think of, and then turning on Screen Curtain with VO-F11. Hope this helps and good luck.

By Tree on Thursday, December 15, 2016 - 21:49

I'm afraid that voice over is probably going to Exhibit some lag and busy errors. I think such behavior is going to be present until Apple decides to wake up and work on actually Improving Voice Over. You can try dozens of different little things to make your system run better; you can discover tweeks through basic googling, for example removing things from your doc. I spent years going down such rabbit wholes, and I think there is no getting around that voice over does not run as smoothly as it should.

I will say that having a computer with an SSD drive can make a world of difference. Mac OS is running pretty well on my new 2016 mac book pro. If you have too much money and you want to give most of it to Apple, you could get a new system and hopefully that will keep issues down to a Manageable Level. If you have an old mac book pro, with a dvd drive, you could try getting an SSD drive for your current machine, and that would be a lot more affordable.

A final option, that I'm sorry to bring up, is you could simply run windows in bootcamp, and that would probably fix most of your performance issues. Like I mentioned, my new mac runs Mac OS very well, but I taught myself NVDA last week, and I believe I will be using Windows more then Mac OS in the future. Window's screen readers are just so much more Responsive and powerful then Voice Over.

I know how annoying the issues you are dealing with can be, and I really hope they improve for you.

By Chris on Thursday, December 15, 2016 - 21:49

Did you try a clean install of the OS? If you've been upgrading for the last two or three years, you may want to take the time to do a clean install from scratch. This is guaranteed to speed up performance. I have to somewhat agree with the last poster. VoiceOver on OS X hasn't been getting as much attention as it should. I think this started around the time either Mountain Lion or Mavericks was released. Apple's focus seems to be shifting from OS X to iOS. I'm personally not happy about it, but that seems to be the direction we're going. If Mac OS X stops being developed or is neglected for so long that VO becomes truly unusable, I may have to look at WIndows 10 or Linux. I wish we still had Snow Leopard and Apple stuck to releasing software every two or three years. This annual release cycle is doing more harm than good.

By Mustafa Dogus on Thursday, December 15, 2016 - 21:49

Thank you Ekaj. I'm using 2015 MacBook Pro with these features: 2.2 Ghz i7, 16 GB DDR3, 256 GB SSD and Intel Iris 1536 MB. This problem occurs even if the battery is full, or when being charged. I will try Screen Curtain.

Thank you Tree. This is general problem of VoiceOver as I see. I'm mostly using Windows with NVDA on BootCamp. In addition, even I can very smoothly work my old (2010) laptop with Windows, but cannot do so on 2015 MacBook Pro... I am not too rich to enrich Apple, unfortunately.

Thank you Chris. I've been upgrading for around two years. I will try clean install.

I am thinkin to buy Microsoft Surface Book next. I suppose new series of Microsoft meet our needs.

Thank you all
Regards