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Aceessibility Services acessing microphone and shows orange dot.

Aceessibility Services acessing microphone and shows orange dot.Also orange mic button is shown in menubar of Accessibility Services with options for mic mode that are standard and voice isolation.

Also Accessibility Services process is running and it memory consumption is increasing rapidly.

MacBook Air 13″

Posted on Sep 21, 2024 4:56 AM

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Posted on Sep 25, 2024 6:56 AM

I'm bothered by this as well. I read about the Vocal Shortcuts feature in macOS Sequoia, tried it out for about five minutes, decided it wasn't for me, and removed the configured shortcut. All of the audio- and microphone-related features in Accessibility are turned off or disabled, it is a day later, and yet the systemwide menu bar still reports that Accessibility Services is accessing (or has recently accessed) my microphone. This false positive greatly reduces the usefulness of what otherwise is a valuable security feature.


(2022 M2 MacBook Air, macOS Sequoia 15.0)

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 25, 2024 6:56 AM in response to devendra_0000

I'm bothered by this as well. I read about the Vocal Shortcuts feature in macOS Sequoia, tried it out for about five minutes, decided it wasn't for me, and removed the configured shortcut. All of the audio- and microphone-related features in Accessibility are turned off or disabled, it is a day later, and yet the systemwide menu bar still reports that Accessibility Services is accessing (or has recently accessed) my microphone. This false positive greatly reduces the usefulness of what otherwise is a valuable security feature.


(2022 M2 MacBook Air, macOS Sequoia 15.0)

Sep 25, 2024 7:45 AM in response to letouj

Running `sudo killall coreaudiod` from Terminal clears the microphone indicator immediately but after a reboot, the erroneous indicator stating that Accessibility Services is listening to the microphone is back in the menu bar (despite all features in Accessibility Services having remained disabled throughout this entire sequence).

Aceessibility Services acessing microphone and shows orange dot.

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