How to fix Accessibility settings issue leading to Browser Crashes on Sonoma?

Please post an EtreCheck report of yiur system and we can look for issues that would cause his

Created an account just to comment and thank carfax + everyone for this thread. I would be banging my head against a wall reinstalling macOS and timemachine backups.

For SEO here is what happened in my case:

Out of nowhere this afternoon my Chrome browser just would crash/quit completely, first it seemed to be happening on just one or two websites so I thought it was maybe a javascript or some other issue. Then I noticed my Discord desktop app would get to the "starting.." and then completely crash.

I wasn't able to figure out how to get an error message from Chrome or Discord but I managed to get a crash report from Safari once I realized it was affecting all browsers. Logging in to another user profile on the same machine did NOT exhibit any issues whatsoever.

I was able to grab a debug report from Safari - the Safari "crashed thread" called out "Dispatch queue: create-voices-avspeech" which sent me down a rabbit hole of searching. Somehow my google searches led me here.

I moved the offending .plist file elsewhere and everything magically worked again. THANK YOU x 1000000000.

Any ideas why the heck this started happening recently for most of us here?

A .plist file is nothing more than a preference file for an app. Sometimes a preference file (.plist) can become corrupted and removing it from the equation will allow the app to re-generate a new .plist file that should work. Corrupt .plist files are unusual however on occasion they do happen!

I will add my most grateful thanks for this fix. Had exactly the same problem in the last 3 days and was about to attempt drastic measures this afternoon until I saw this thread. Chrome, Safari and (default) Firefox all crashing. The plist deletion did the trick. Have no idea how the plist change occurred. Muchas gracias.

Not to frustrate you further but...

Get Find Any File...

http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/index.php

Hold Option or alt key when selecting Find to Find All.

You can use Drive DX to possibly get a better view of Drive health…

https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx

You would find in in the User's Home directory /Library/Preferences

Since the home folder's Library is usually hidden one way to get there is to use the Finder's Go menu and select "Go to Folder..." and type in: ~/Library/Preferences

Or you can hold down the Option key on your keyboard and select the Go menu in Finder - with the Option key held down the user's Library will appear in the list.

This is the perfect fix, spent hours today re-installing, trying other profiles, doing Time Machine restores. eventually gave up, then thought one last search. and ban Perfect fix is right here. Thanks.

Thanks! I should have found this post two days ago :-)

Also went down the path to reinstall Sonoma 14.5 - which somehow messed up the FusionDrive and left me without startup disk/recovery image.

But on the positive side: I learned to create a bootable MacOS image on USB, fix a broken FusionDrive and reinstall MacOS Sonoma + Time Machine recovery.

What remains is the answer to the question: How did we end up in this situation? Speech settings in System settings/Accessibility worked fine after a fresh Sonoma install so something must have happened afterwards.

Yes, I looked there and also searched for all plist files on my Mac. It’s nowhere to be found.

I set up a new user on my Mac and, under this test user, the accessibility crash problem isn’t an issue. I checked the Preferences folder and did find the file you all indicated under this new user.

I’m truly stumped.

What impact does this have on the rest of the OS? Certainly this file isn't there for no reason.

Do to this and so many other reasons, I'm going to have to migrate everything to a real browser such as Chrome of Firefox. Apple gives low priority to Safari, meaning it never works as well as the others.

Thanks a lot!!

I got crazy for the past week!

Firefox crashing every time I was opening pages that I was commonly opening several times a day.

Switched to Safari and same story!!

I was ready to reinstall everything or downsizing the last macOS Sonoma.

And then, I opened the crash report and start to search the error codes and magically you gave the solution!

Many many thanks!

Giovanni

harddrivin1le wrote:

Do to this and so many other reasons, I'm going to have to migrate everything to a real browser such as Chrome of Firefox. Apple gives low priority to Safari, meaning it never works as well as the others.

You must not have realized by reading this thread that Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and any other browser will crash and the solution is to delete the preference file listed. It is not specific to the Safari browser.

For you (and others) facing this issue on older versions of macOS, I wish I had a straight answer but I imagine this prefs file has a different name on older versions of the OS. Given that System Preferences became System Settings at Ventura, its likely your file is in a different location or with a different name but serves the same purpose.

I wish I had an older Mac to test this theory on. Apologies!

Hi carfax, great job!

Your hint helped me in the beginning of June already and my system (MBPro 2019 / SONOMA 14.5 23F79) is still OK.

I have discussed so communicated this topic in several sessions with Apple Support.

So they must be aware...

I just pointed Apple again to your proposed solution.