Writing Tools in Action menu

It feels like a sledgehammer solution, but the only way to disable this message seems to be to turn off Apple Intelligence and restart. I'll hope this message goes away in a future Sequoia release.

I didn't really expect a security release to address this problem, so no real surprise.

I did take the time to send an email to accessibility@apple.com and ask for help with eliminating this extraneous and distracting announcement. Hopefully they have a solution, or can get the developers to address the problem.

Apple accessibility says: It is possible to disable Writing Tools in the Screen Time settings. Open System Settings and select Screen Time, select Content & Privacy, then turn on Content & Privacy Restrictions. Click Intelligence & Siri, then turn Writing Tools off.

Yes, that works, but ... I thought I made it pretty clear that I was trying to disable the announcement, not the writing tools menu itself. I replied to them and restated my request, specifically asking that this announcement be controlled by general verbosity or speech hints.

Anyone on the MacOS beta, please file a feedback enhancement request to this effect. Thanks.

I filed this as a suggestion in Feedback assistant: FB16064900, asking that this announcement be disabled when VoiceOver verbosity is set to low, or that Apple add a new speech hint toggle to control this announcement.

But the more I think about it, it's a bug. When you select text with VoiceOver enabled, you expect to hear VoiceOver announce the selected text. This announcement suggests to the user that they have selected text that reads "writing tools in action menu."

The workaround is to press VO+F6 to hear what text has actually been selected.

I'm reviving this thread, as it seems a better place for the discussion than the 15.3 announcement.

I got curious about WTA (writing tools announcement) and how it worked for sighted users. So I brought in my sighted spouse to look over my shoulder at what was happening on screen, because I figured there must be some popup that says "writing tools in action menu," I mean, why would VoiceOver announce it to blind users if there wasn't some corresponding visual signal to sighted users. With my spouse watching, I selected some text. VoiceOver read it, made the new chime sound, then announced "Writing tools in action menu." And we repeated the experiment with VoiceOver disabled.

The interesting thing is what my spouse saw, or, rather, didn't see. Other than the text highlighting that happened as a result of me selecting the text, nothing else changed. There was no popup on the screen telling sighted users that writing tools is in the action menu.

So, here's a plain case where MacOS is treating blind and sighted users very different. To my sighted spouse, this just looks like normal text selection, with no distracting popup or sound effect. In contrast, we VoiceOver users are forced to endure WTA and its corresponding chime every time we select text.

How would sighted users respond if they had to endure some kind of visual popup about writing tools every time they selected text? I'm having a hard time imagining they would be okay with that. So why are blind users being treated differently?

This reminds me of the dreaded paper clip smart assistant back in the early days of Microsoft Office, which became a laughing stock, a poster child for OS manufacturers dumbing down their product and treating their users as if they were imbeciles. And I simply can't fathom why Apple is making this same type of mistake.

But I would complete your sentence like this. If this is true, then that means the writing tools announcement is entirely unnecessary.

Good to know I'm not alone. For me, editing an essay, blog post, short story, or poem is a bit like performing surgery. I've opened my patient, and I have a good idea what's wrong. But, just as I make that critical life-or-death incision with my scalpel, the nurse tells me that my shoelace is untied. But only because I'm blind. They would never say that to a sighted surgeon.

I'm surprised other AppleVis users aren't as outraged as I am. I feel like some kind of mad prophet screaming in the desert.

It seems that Apple has failed to provide any controls to dampen or mute WTA, even though verbosity and speech hints controls exist for similar announcements. If Apple wants to stop me from beating this dead horse, they could do so easily by making WTA obey my verbosity setting.

If my nurse were dressed like a clown, it would be totally appropriate for this issue.

You're thinking of custom verbosity in VO Utility. If this announcement were controlled by verbosity, that would be great. I could go in to custom verbosity and turn it off. But it's not.

Sadly, waiting for common-sense changes to custom verbosity is way behind schedule. Years ago, I suggested adding Command+Tab icons to custom verbosity so that a Command+Tab to the Mail icon would announce the number of unread messages even when general verbosity was set to low. Still waiting for that one.

Thanks for trying to find a way to turn this message off. But Apple Accessibility has already told me that the only way to do that is to disallow access to Writing Tools (or turn off Apple Intelligence, as I had already discovered). What I really need now is a lot of people to open feedback requests, or email Tim Cook, or enlist a shaman to cast a spell, whatever it takes to get Apple back to making computers easier to use instead of harder.

I used to develop software. If WTA is distracting me while writing fiction, I would imagine it's ten times more disruptive when writing code.

My ultimate fix has been to disable access to writing tools using Screen Time in System Settings. This leaves Apple Intelligence operational, with the unfortunate side effect of making it so difficult to access writing tools when I do need them that I don't even bother trying.