Transitioning From Big Sir to Tahoe

By Scott Duck, 28 June, 2026

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I just retired my 2015 MacBook Pro, after 10 years, due to serious battery issues, and just bought a 2026 M5 MacBook Air, so I just transitioned straight from Big Sir to Tahoe. I'm having a couple issues and I'm wondering if there are solutions or if I will just have to live with these issues..

When editing text and I read a paragraph with VO plus P, I sometimes get very long pauses between sentences. This seems to be related to the length of the paragraph. From what I can tell, it only happens with paragraphs longer than 900 characters. I have encountered this issue in both Pages and Text Edit, so I suspect that it would happen in any edit field. It did not do this in Big Sir or the earlier versions of Mac OS before that. Is there a way to fix this?

When using quick nav in Safari, well, it's just a mess. I can turn quick nav on and move by heading, find the heading I want, and that's where things fall apart. I switch to the left and right arrows and sometimes it will read the way it's supposed to but, after varying lengths of time but usually pretty quickly, it will start going character by character. Once it starts doing that, it will no longer move by heading. I can turn quick nav off and back on and that will usually fix it but only very briefly. Is there a setting that I can change or some change in newer versions of Mac OS that I'm missing that makes quick nav work differently than I'm used to? Or do I just need to give up on quick nav?

I have only had the new MacBook for a couple days so I will probably have more questions. The apps I primarily use are Pages, Numbers, Safari, Mail, Messages, Notes, and Amadeus Pro for audio editing. Beyond just the things I have mentioned here, I would welcome any input concerning transitioning from Big Sir to Tahoe, particularly using these apps.

Options

Comments

By Tyler on Monday, June 29, 2026 - 00:15

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Hi, here are some answers to your questions:

  • VoiceOver's pauses between sentences: This was introduced with the release of macOS Tahoe. To my knowledge, there is no way to change this behavior.
  • Quick Nav: Arrow-key and Single-key Quick Nav were separated into their own modes with the release of macOS Sonoma. If you're used to the Quick Nav toggle applying to both Quick Nav modes, as was the behavior in macOS Big Sur, make sure "Toggles all Quick Nav" is selected from the "Left and right arrow keys" popup menu in VoiceOver Utility > Commands. I've found that if Quick Nav spontaneously stops working, it can be reliably restored by focusing on and then off of a text field. This can be as simple as tabbing past a search field on a webpage, or pressing VO-F to reveal VoiceOver's find field, and then pressing Escape to dismiss it to return to your task.

HTH

By TheBlindGuy07 on Monday, June 29, 2026 - 01:38

You go in the voice specific settings where you can change its rate and etc and at the end there is usually an option about sentence pauses, it's a steper so interact in then vo down arrow. Eloquence and virtually all nuance voices have this option and some have more.