Two Odd Things logging into a Mac

It does happen to me too. I'm using a Mac Pro 14 running M2 Chip.
I remember in one of my conversations with Apple Accessibility, the agent says it's a known issue that Voice Over misbehaves in the secure log-in screen on Mac OS.
I noticed that some time, with some updates after I went totally berserk in one of my emails, reflecting on how apathetic, at least in my and many others' sentiment that Apple appears to be, in their effort to work on many bugs that have sustained over a staggering number of different versions, this became a standard behaviour.
It used to happen on my Mac, that Voice Over went completely unusable after the log-in authentication screen. No matter what I did, Voice Over would just not work again. The only way that would fix it is to restart the Mac. I think rather than addressing the bug, they just decided to water it down and went the easy way of reverting use's settings and prevent us from sticking to the option of our choosing, without so much of half a word of notice at all.
Incredibly irresponsible in my opinion!

Regarding the stuck keyboard, where the cursor is not moving anywhere, and it only generates the default ding sound, you can try one of these two workaround.
You can try pressing the VO+Left or Right Arrow combination many many, many times. After a while, it will become dislodged and hopefully, will allow you to start interacting with it normally again.
Another, and often the quicker way to try is to turn Voice Over off and back on again. For me at least, it almost always solves the problem.
Good luck 🤠.

First point: I have an Apple Silicon Mac, and I'm not experiencing either issue. There will be a reason why you're having the problems and I am not. I don't know what that is. Apple is in the best position to find out. I would suggest contacting them and creating a support case to work through it.

I remember in one of my conversations with Apple Accessibility, the agent says it's a known issue that Voice Over misbehaves in the secure log-in screen on Mac OS.
Then why the bloody hell are nt they fix it?

This problem on my for you but I do have it on my own one. Actually I have VoiceOver every time I get to the login screen not be enabled so I have to turn them on myself used

So if VO works on the log in screen, and you get that ding sound, just press down on the trackpad and you will be presented with the fields for user name and password.

it is easier, and simpoler, to turn on automatic login. that way, you go straiit to the finder, with no pointless fuss. that's what I do.

Alban is not recommended, especially if you have sensitive really sensitive data flash drive

Back when I was running Big Sur and earlier versions of macOS, I never had this issue, but I have experienced this in both Monterey and Ventura. Personally, I just don't bother with the setting, and just manually toggle on VO once my machine is booted up.
With regards to the password field, you could try:
1. VO + Command + F4 (synchs the Keyboard cursor with the VO cursor).
2. VO + Command + F5 (synchs the mouse pointer with the VO cursor).
3. VO + Shift + F4 (Synchs the VO cursor with the Keyboard).
4. VO + Shift + F5 (synchs the VO cursor with the mouse).

One of those should hopefully put your focus in the edit field. Of course you could also try toggling VO off and on.

Finally I would not recommend auto login. It gives anyone potential access to your files and personal data.

For those experiencing this issue, are you using FileVault? On my M2 MacBook Air with FileVault on, VoiceOver consistently starts at the login prompt, and with my old 2018 Intel MacBook Air with FileVault on, the spoken prompt to enter my username and password also appeared reliably. From my reading of this thread and others related to this issue, it sounds like both Intel and Apple Silicon-based Macs are affected, which is making me wonder if FileVault being off is a possible contributing factor.

I have FileVault enabled, an M1 Pro-based Mac, and no issues.

At least on my newer Mac M2, there are two "types" of log-in screen.
The first type is the one you would get right after starting up the Mac after it has been completely shut down. This, to my understanding, is a boot or pre-boot environment. In this screen, Voce Over starts up automatically all and every time for me with no problem. The only issue occurring to me on this screen is the second issue he mentioned, which is the keyboard being stuck. Again, restarting Voice Over or spamming it with VO+Left/Right arrow key would help.
The other type of log-in screen will show up either when you choose to log-out of the current user, or when the Mac logs out automatically after a set amount of time. The Voice Over Auto Start function being reverted only happens in this case, and, I guess, also to either other Macs without the newer Apple Chip, or Macs without the T2 security chip. But please don't quote me on this speculation haha.
Oh, and forgot to add, that I do have File Vault on.

As I understand things, the T2 chipset allows for some decent security with or without File Vault. My question, in your case, would it be better to go without File Vault?

For those of us without a T2 chipset, does File Vault really make VO work better? Also, for those of you who did not experience the "Safari Not Responding" bug, were you using File Vault?

Thanks in advance. 😎

The main point of FileVault is to encrypt your internal disk so that even if someone gained unauthorized physical access to your Mac, or tried to remove the SSD and connect it to another device, they would not be able to access its data without knowing or guessing the login password. For me, I have it on not due to any unique security risk, but rather because it's the default and I never saw any reason to turn it off.

It has been suggested that on Macs without the T2 Security Chip or Apple Silicon, there may be a slight performance penalty when using FileVault, however I never experienced any noticeable slowdowns in my use case, and I don't know if anyone's done any kind of benchmarking to support or refute that assertion. On Macs with the T2 Security Chip or Apple Silicon, there shouldn't be any kind of performance impacts, as at least from my understanding, encryption is handled at the hardware level separate and isolated from other operations of the computer.

Regarding the "Safari is not responding" bug, I can't imagine how the status of FileVault would make much of a difference either way, especially on modern Macs, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try turning it on or off to see if that is indeed the case.

My understanding is that on an Apple Silicon Mac, the SSD is encrypted, and that enabling FileVault simply protects the encryption key with a password (presumably by encrypting it with another key derived from the password). This is why the files are not overwritten when you turn on FileVAult.

It does take time to either encrypt or decrypt all data stored on the disc, so turning on or off FileVault is a relatively long process. As to how long, it depends on the size of our data.
I will, or more accurately, may give it a try, but only on a particularly good day some time 😳.

Using an Apple Silicon Mac, activating FileVAult is almost instant, precisely because it doesn't have to rewrite the data. On an old Intel Mac without the T2 chip, it does have to rewrite the data, though.