On Safari, when typing an address or search query with Command+L, VoiceOver announces autocomplete suggestions, which is helpful. However, even when there are no autocomplete suggestions, VoiceOver still reads the entire query after every single letter typed. This is incredibly distracting—imagine hearing your full search query repeated after each keystroke.
To fix this, I disabled Safari’s search engine suggestions in Preferences > Search, but it didn’t help. I still hear the full query after every character input. This issue doesn’t occur in other browsers like Google Chrome or Firefox.
Please fix this so we don’t have to mute VoiceOver every time we use the search field.
Comments
Reported
I also reported this and sent logs a couple months ago. This is very annoying!
@Chris
Has it always been like this? It's ridiculous. I'm a relatively new Mac OS user, so I can't really tell.
Yes
I’ve been a mac user for over 10 years, and Safari has always done this.
I’ve just gotten used to it at this point.
has anyone submitted a screen recording of the issue?
has anyone submitted a screen recording of the issue and turned on your microphone and said what you want to happen and why? at the very least it should be optional if it does this.
I Wonder if This is Autocomplete
I am very familiar with this issue and find it incredibly annoying. But I wonder if what we are seeing is the system trying to autocomplete the address as we type? I hate 'auto-anything' so of course I want this type of verbosity to stop and stay stopped, but I wonder what is happening on screen?
This got to be so bad when I…
This got to be so bad when I was on macOS, that I made a keyboard commander shortcut for the VoiceOver mute toggle, which was option plus shift plus V (as in Victor). It got to the point that I would hit that hotkey combination, each time I would type in the address field, and then hit it again to unmute VoiceOver, once I pressed enter.
I have an idea as to what could be causing this.
I most noticed this when either typing in a previously visited website, or a previously searched term.
I’m not currently near my Mac but will test this when I am. If memory serves me correctly, typing something like “apple dot”, will make VoiceOver say the name of the website that It is suggesting. For me, it would probably say “AppleVis” but once I type the dot character, it would start suggesting me apple.com.
Also, I would assume this would be the same if you typed the letter G. So safari would start suggesting Google, or the most frequently visited website that starts with the letter G. I’m pretty sure that VoiceOver behaves this way because it is reselecting the text after you type a letter.
In any browser, when a completion is selected, you can hit one of the arrow keys, and it fills in the completion. Once a completion is filled in, going to something like apple.com/shop, voiceover probably would not announce the query as I typed the word shop, because I usually don’t visit that website. For someone who buys from Apple‘s website on a day-to-day basis, that might be different.
I don’t know of any way to turn it off, and it sounds like people have tried to disable it And have failed.
It’s been a long time since I’ve used Internet Explorer, but I feel like I remember NVDA with Internet Explorer doing the same thing, or at least something very similar. That was over eight or nine years ago when I last touched IE, so memory could be wrong.
iOS does something similar.
For me, opening the address bar and typing a character of a frequently visited website will cause voiceover to say the name of the website after a few seconds. It’s less obtrusive than macOS, but I believe it is the same thing, letting you know that if you hit the go key, this is the website that will be navigated to.
I’ve been having this same…
I’ve been having this same problem on iOS for at least a year, maybe two. It’s so disruptive when trying to search for anything.