VoiceOver on the log in screen

By Alicia Krage, 11 March, 2026

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

HI everyone,

For a few weeks now I've had a password set up on my mac, so whenever I would restart my mac or turn it on after it's been shut down, I'd have to enter my password. Usually I'd hear something like, "enter password, VoiceOver will not read the characters" or something like that.

As of this morning, it doesn't say that and I have to turn VoiceOver on manually. I'm wondering if I somehow turned off a setting by accident. Hopefully someone in here can help.

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Comments

By Brian on Wednesday, March 11, 2026 - 19:19

While I do not know which Mac computer you are using, or what version of macOS, I can tell you that my old MacBook Pro, currently running macOS 12 (Monterey), has this issue as well. I have to manually enable VoiceOver every single time I reboot. Not sure if there are any workarounds for this, but yeah, it's not really anything new. 🙂

HTH.

By Alicia Krage on Wednesday, March 11, 2026 - 19:26

I updated my MacBook air to the latest version last week and it was fine until this morning. Not sure what version it is lol I got it in 2024 it was a gift.

By Brian on Wednesday, March 11, 2026 - 19:42

I stand by my previous statement though, it's an old issue. 😛

By João Santos on Wednesday, March 11, 2026 - 20:19

Do you have FileVault enabled by any chance? Because the experience differs when you do, as only a tiny portion of the filesystem required to decrypt everything is unencrypted, although still digitally signed. When you have FileVault enabled, a rudimentary log-in screen is displayed right after the boot chord, and the screen-reader available there is a stripped-down version of VoiceOver.

One thing I'm noticing since updating to macOS 26.3, meaning the previous stable version since currently we are on 26.3.1, is that often VoiceOver fails to recognize the authentication prompt, stating that there's nothing in focus, and not listing any open applications or windows even when you press VO+Fn+F1 or VO+Fn+F2, thus requiring cycling the screen-reader. This happened on both my M1 and M4 Max Macs, so I'm pretty sure that it's not a specific case especially since I wiped my M1 Mac pretty recently.

If you don't have FileVault enabled then I cannot talk since I always run my Macs on FileVault, and only took a short break after going blind until I learned that the boot process was still accessible with some beeps hinting at the current state when FileVault was enabled, which evolved to a static recorded utterance from the Alex voice at some point, and finally to a fully-blown screen-reader on modern Macs.

By Alicia Krage on Wednesday, March 11, 2026 - 20:23

Hi there,

I don't honestly remember about FileVault. Where do I check?