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

Question

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

Lately, I have been having many issues, such as several of my browsers crashing when trying to visit sites I have visited for a long time. Sites like Amazon, Best Buy, PNC Bank, and many others. It isn't just one browser that has this problem. I have the same issues on Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Duck Duck Go, and Edge. Some sites will crash in one browser but not another. From the crash logs, the issue mostly deals with the Dispatch queue: create-voices-avspeech

I have been trying to find this issue on the web to no avail. I have found that it might have something to do with Accessibility in settings specifically related to Spoken Content. I get this error: Extension process Accessibility(32872) exited, and Live Speech, I get this error: Extension process Accessibility(32996) exited.

I have tried finding more information, but these IDs change every time I visit them.

I'm in desperate need of a solution to this problem. If anyone has any insights or potential fixes, I would greatly appreciate your assistance.

I am running on macOS Sonoma V 14.5

[Re-Titled By Moderator]

iMac 27″, macOS 14.5

Posted on May 22, 2024 10:13 AM

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Answer 1

May 23, 2024 5:26 PM in response to Tigerladybarb

Hi Tigerladybarb - I had exactly the same issue straight after a Somona upgrade ... browser apps crashing on certain sites (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) - their dumps showed the crashes were linked to speech. I had the same errors in System Preferences -> Accessibility-> Spoken Content and Live Speech. Also in terminal "say hello" threw an exception.

I created a separate admin account on the macbook and tested for the above - none of the symptoms were present so how I fixed it was to make a backup of ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.* from both my existing and my new user accounts, then when logged in as my existing account, copied in the files from my new admin account overwriting the old settings. Apologies if anyone is looking for precision but I didn't find the specific properties list file as this does reset most of your settings but I was able to quickly redo my changed settings.

Not suggesting this approach is for purists as it needs more precision but it worked for me no guarantee it will work for anyone else - I first backed up all files in my ~/Library/Preferences in case I needed them

Login as new user

mkdir /tmp/user1

chmod 777 /tmp/user1

cp ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.* /tmp/user1

Login as original user then

cp /tmp/user1/com.apple.* ~/Library/Preferences

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Answer 2

ueadian

Level 1

20 points

May 24, 2024 2:53 PM in response to Tigerladybarb

To expand upon the solution, just go to a terminal and do "rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SpeakSelection.plist". Also for SEO here's the error from Chrome if someone searches for it.

Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException'

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