VO reading from non-active tabs in Safari

By wheelysneakycat, 24 January, 2021

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi,

I have a pretty old MacBook Pro and I’ve only just updated to sierra. I am now having a problem in Safari that I’ve never experienced before. I’m trying to read a webpage but voice-over keeps reading out what sounds like snippets of information from some other tabs which are present bit which are not the active tab I’m trying to read. it is making the use of Safari impossible because the speech reading the inactive tab interrupts what I’m trying to read and I cannot get it to stop or when I do get it to stop and start reading what I want, in a few seconds it will start reading from an inactive tab again. Is this a known bug or has anyone else experienced it? I wonder if there’s anything I can do about it?

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Comments

By dvdmth on Thursday, February 4, 2021 - 22:05

It's been a while, but I do remember once encountering an issue like you describe when having multiple tabs open in Safari. I haven't dealt with it in years, but that's how old Sierra is, so it's entirely possible what I experienced was the same bug. I remember being able to work around the bug, but I don't remember how. Maybe it was turning VO off and back on, or maybe it was switching to another app and switching back, or cycling between tabs, or moving focus out of the web content and moving back in. Something worked to get around it, but I just don't remember what I did. It was a recurring issue, though, so I had to do it periodically, which was definitely annoying.

I will try unloading and loading voiceover again. I did try switching away and back to Safari and switching tabs but neither of those worked. At least I’m not the only one experiencing it. It’s driving me round the bend! Thanks for your reply.

By wheelysneakycat on Thursday, February 4, 2021 - 22:05

It surprises me that VO can even manage to read the content as those tabs are not active. It reads the content from some specific tabs over and over again and I wonder how it accesses that content given that those pages haven’t really loaded yet as far as I knew. I wonder if it is something special about those webpages because it always does it with the same pages. Application