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Comment by ClawsOnPaws | Hacker News Reader

It is just random bugs. Switching punctuation schemes. The terminal doesn't read very well, VoiceOver loves to say "not responding" in Safari and locks up, live regions don't always read correctly, quick nav (basically automatically holding down the voiceover modifier so you can more quickly use navigate through the screen) adds random delay to each key press, it's just lots and lots and lots of small issues like this that compound. This is just a small list of them. None of them are a huge problem by itself, but combined they do make things frustrating sometimes. And then of course the ability to script badly behaving, or completely inaccessible, apps is just missing, so you can't fix apps even if you knew how to. And of course VoiceOver on the Mac is all you get. So if you don't like it, tough luck. You won't ever get a real alternative that can access what VoiceOver can.

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> VoiceOver loves to say "not responding" in Safari and locks up,

I wonder, what's the correct solution for this ? Because so many apps I use including browser are definitely "not responding" multiple times per day for various reasons (full ram, internet stall, etc.)

Using VoiceOver compounds the not responding issue. I don't know how its internals work, but I imagine it tries to keep a view of the window's state--tree of elements, ETC. If the window has a lot going on, VoiceOver can get really sluggish, and I think it must somehow block the underlying app's ability to send/receive events, because you will press VO+right arrow to move to the next element, VO says "Safari/Chrome/Brave" not responding, and if you open up Force Quit, it reflects the same there. Reading a large diff on GitHub flat out doesn't work for me at all. Also, sometimes when navigating certain webpages, VoiceOver will just outright crash. Luckily, it does restart itself (not that pressing CMD+F5 is hard), but then my focus is moved to a completely different part of the page.

I honestly don't know how anyone thinks terminal support in VoiceOver is acceptable--it's virtually unusable. It's so bad that I used to fire up a Windows VM just for a functioning terminal, and while I was at it, I'd browse the web and use Notepad++ there, because Windows accessibility is just better (I used NVDA). But then I discovered Fenrir, figured out that it worked with Vim (NVDA doesn't), shut down the VM, and never looked back. Today, I use Wezterm, which VoiceOver doesn't read at all. In my case, that's good, because the only thing I want talking in the terminal is my terminal screen reader (I started writing my own, and it's my daily driver).

To be fair, reading the terminal is a completely different beast from reading a GUI. In addition to building a static view of the screen for review, you have to handle dynamic updates (auto read). Cursor movement tracking, figuring out when to read what, when not to read (an f just appeared on my screen, but I just typed the letter f; if key echo is turned off, I don't want to hear "f"). If a line was just added, it should be read, but if my cursor was moved to a different line, I want to hear the line it moved to, but not if that line was just read because it just appeared. All sorts of rules you sort of discover as you go. But the one thing you definitely don't want is for any new change to interrupt what was already being read, and that's exactly what VoiceOver does.

Thanks!

I do my best to make my apps accessible, so feedback like this helps.

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