Hello Applevis,
As I said on some earlier posts of mine, I bought my Mac last year and am slowly discovering the joy of macos and voiceover weirdness, for the bad but also the good. :)
So! Macbook pro M2 base model 14 inch, stable Macos 14.4.1, Voiceover in English verbosity to medium generally.
In Pages, especially with somehow visually looking great word documents from college not made by me that are opened in pages to avoid me throwing my mac away because of word an voiceover.. I could understand that there are some formatting and layout issue, no problem with that, although from personal experience with a side by side by vo+t and nvda+f compareason I think pages handels formatting from .doc and .docx better than google docs. Just an opinion of course as I am... blind! :) Like my nickname isn't already telling it. Aside of possible formatting issue, pages seemed great at first glance when I actually start leveraging it a month ago.
So, real world example that happened today in the worst moment and in the worst way possible. I was doing an exam in college, just a regular word document, nothing too complexe. Tipical formatting, some layout, fonts, italic and bold, 0 thing centered... A classic thing! Nvda would not have had any problem with this on windows.
The bug I will be discribing is not new but it was especially bothering it today, and I noticed it first on macos sonoma 14.4 as I started using pages only at the beginning of march. I don't know if it's a new thing, I almost hope it's new otherwise pages is just unusable so nobody should ever buy a mac...
On windows, I am used to overuse a lot ctrl left and ctrl right arrow whenever possible to read word by word. I don't think it's an uncommon practice. On mac, in pages, with that document mentioned above and even native one created with pages where I'd start doing some fancy visual stuff I won't see anyway (I am not suffering from any mental distress although macos and vo are pushing my boundaries).
It's unclear as to why voiceover does that but I clearly know how and almost when it happens.
You start navigating in the text, with either down arrow to go line by line, or word by word (the latter is where the actual bug happens in its most powerful.. version). Speech verbosity to medium currently, text attribute set to do nothing. As you navigate this text, after 5-20 words (this weird interval is intentional as it's doesn't seem to be text or text/line size dependent), the... equivalent of lower pitch jaws cursor that voiceover also does, would keep saying "normal,", "normal," before each word. I don't need to tell you how devastating this shit is for productivity. Note that in 100% of these occurences, there are litterally 0, no formatting/layout/attribute changes at all under the cursor as shown by vo+t. Just, after a couple of words or even sentences, and whether it's on the same paragraph line or on another line, voiceover says the normal attribute aftor some words when navigating from left to right. I haven't tested yet if it also happens in the reverse order, which should never happen in the first place but we all know how catastrophic voiceover is for announcing symbols in a simple logical order, beyond the scope of this current bug report.
What I've discovered is that this bug has a weird trigger. Now, if you set your text attribute announcement to speech with vo+v, you'll discover that each time this bug happens, the... I'll call it text.WatchForAttributeChangesUnderCurser function.... Voiceover, forgets, or ignores, where he is and likes to do a rescan of the full attribute list under the cursor for 0 reason, with that verbosity setting re announces everything even if nobody has pressed vo+t, and even with verbosity to low and everything cut, the "normal", announcement is still there and there's no way I've found so far to kick this. So in my case something like "times new roman 12 italic normal", or along those lines , after 10 words or so. What's sadly amazing is that this same behaviour can also happen, with the same check to see the "trigger", in textedit. Open it in richtext mode, or just open a slightly formatted document in it, and voiceover does the same behaviour. Before sending a real bug report to apple I'd ask if I am the only one to have this, and or, hopefully, if there's a viable workaround so I can actually navigate real world document without having to use 2 (trackpad), 3 (capslock) or 4 fingers for the rotor which is not what I'd call a convenient workaround. I went as far as selecting everything in that exam document, selecting normal text attribute in the ... right panel when we interact out of the pages area and go right, but voiceover kept doing that frustrating thing. Hopefully it'sa false memory of mine but I somehow remember pages on ios with a keyboard announcing normal when doing option right/left arrow back in 2019 or before while navigating some text.
Any useful contribution will be appreciated!
... The following text was cut to prevent further negativity in this wonderful website but was something along the line apple accessibility has become......... I respect the wonderful job David has done over the years! :)
By TheBllindGuy07, 4 April, 2024
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
There’s no workaround. this isn’t the place for resolutions
It’s really important that you reach out to Apple directly. This is not Apple. This is not even a website affiliated with Apple. It’s independent. You leaving any kind of bug report here does nothing. It is extremely important that you reach out to Apple directly, you can either call them at 877-204-3930 or reaching them at accessibility@apple.com. It’s not bad that you reached out. And I would encourage you to not expect any meaningful resolution through this website.
Respectfully
@Ash Rein, do not take any offence by what I will be saying, or my tone and language. I have (so far) an excelent relationship with Apple's accessibility team, I have already reached out them for a bug. The reason of my message was
1. Ask to the community whether this is an isolated case of it's a real spread bug they also have encountered, and if yes at which version, etc.
2. If there is a viable workaround users can suggest me, and you did exactly that by telling me there was not, and I am glad for you having done that! :)
I know, and do not asume, applevis being affiliated with apple in any way possible, neither do I want or expect them to be so but for everyone being in an ideal world but then applevis wouldn't have its core purpose anyway.
I was just, asking, and a forum's purpose is exactly that :)
Thanks! :)
Best,
Old NSTextView issues
I'm not sure about that specific issue, as I avoid using rich text editors on MacOS as much as possible, but I do know that NSTextView, which powers TextEdit and probably Pages too, has been having issues with VoiceOver for at least 10 years, which is how long I've been blind.
I believe that the problem is in VoiceOver because I started developing a code editor for the Mac a while back and it also manifested in my editor. It was actually because of this that I started working on a new screen-reader for MacOS a few months ago, but haven't implemented support for text editing yet so I can't confirm my suspicion.
My go-to option for writing documents without any sight is LaTeX. It's a very technical typesetting format commonly used to write scientific white papers which is accessible by accident because it's written in plain text, and offers a great deal of control provided that you retain the ability to mentally visualize things. The PDFs that it generates are not very accessible, but as long as you have access to the LaTeX sources that shouldn't be a problem.
Why all the important bugs
people should be aware of are so deep down in the thread that such trategies are necessary.
LaTeX
It's a professional typesetting system, not a word processor, and it's what I've used for important writing projects. I don't particularly like WYSIWYG word processors, especially when using a screen reader.
To review a LaTeX document, it's best to convert it to HTML using TeX4HT, Lwarp, LaTeXML or any of the other well known LaTeX to HTML conversion tools.
The automatic citation and bibliography generation is excellent also.
I know latex
But I won't learn it just as a workaround for this bug. And by my last messag4e I didn't meant nobody answered I was contacted by pm. But it's such an irritating bug and occurres everywhere I am surprised why more people aren't talking about it. I've already sent my own bug report to apple.
Can't Reproduce this Every Time
I've tried reproducing this with text attributes on and off. "Normal" is a text style out of MS Word whereas Pages uses "Body" as the default style. I'm wondering if there is underlying style code inside Word docs that is causing VoiceOver to inconsistently do this.
NSTextView sounds like it's a holdover from NeXTStep (NS) APIs which should probably be replaced by Swift APIs in a future version of mac OS. I'd say that text views on Mac have progressively become more inconsistent in apps like Safari, TextEdit and Pages.
It would help Apple Accessibility if you can send screen recordings. I do this and get useful responses from them.
Good luck.
It is less frequent in Pages but there
If this bug was only present in word, I could somehow tolerate it. But for college I'm working on an essay and because of openai adds we write iit in class and in college I only use my mac for battery life, So I started this in pages, with 0 formatting applied except double spacing everything. And much less frequent but after a couple of words / sentences voiceover would randomly say (body in pages) and the exact same bug occurres.
Unsure of what the bug is?
I don't want to sound rude. But I do want to help you describe bugs better.
Bug descriptions are easiest to understand when they are short and concise.
When describing a bug, it's often useful to provide steps for reproduction, and when you get to the step where the behavior is incorrect, describe both the expected and incorrect behavior.
Without a concise description that clearly describes both the expected and incorrect behavior, it's hard to understand exactly what issue you believe is incorrect. I had to read through the original lengthy post a couple of times to suss this out.
What I took away: when moving by word with Option+Right or Left Arrow, VoiceOver unnecessarily and annoyingly announces, "normal," or other formatting information, for no apparent reason. This happens in Pages with some, but not all, Word docs. Yes, I've experienced VoiceOver unnecessarily announcing formatting and other extraneous information, and this happens whether I'm reading documents in Pages, Word, or Google Docs.
I will add that I've been using Pages to read MS Word docs for several years now, and aside from some annoying quirks, I've found it usable. But lately, I've been using MS Word rather than Pages. It's been a slow and frustrating switch, but I've found I can use MS Word for simple reading of documents just as effectively as Pages. Even better, I can do simple editing and saving in Word without fear of completely screwing up the formatting.
I'll conclude by stating that I'm a writer and editor. And in my experience, the Mac has plenty of room for improvement in the language arts. The de facto standard MS Word is no paragon of software engineering or UI design, and it seems like it would be pretty straightforward for a company with a reputation as the computing platform for artists to swoop in, create an innovative, powerful, and usable word processor, and completely eat Microsoft's lunch. We can ponder why this hasn't happened until the heat death of the universe.