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Using VoiceOver with Screen Zoom and the Mouse

To preface, I come from a PC background using NVDA and JAWS. What I'm trying to do just might not be a VoiceOver configuration that's possible.


I'm a mostly blind user. Way more than legally, but not quite totally. I'm a full time screen reader user on all of my devices. On laptops I cannot see the screen so I use full keyboard navigation. On desktops I have a big monitor and with substantial zoom I can read text, but overall just like using my mouse to point at things for the SR to read.


On NVDA and JAWS this is called Mouse Tracking and Mouse Echo, specifically. The quirks of these features are:

The screen reader will announce whatever is under the cursor

The mouse cursor will not actually move the the screen reader navigation focus to the text that it reads

If the mouse leaves the active window and highlights text in a window partially obscured by the active window, it will read the text but will not change the active window. This is the key behavior I'm looking for.


I'd like to be able to point to things with my mouse on a Mac and have them read in real time, but I would like to do this without VoiceOver yanking whatever window it lands on to the front of focus. As it stands I need to have each window maximized on its own space, or forego this interaction model entirely.


Is there a set of configurations or community script that can achieve this behavior? If not it will at least be good to know so I can stop wasting my time trying to apparently fit a square peg in a round hole.

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 15.0

Posted on Oct 11, 2024 12:32 PM

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Using VoiceOver with Screen Zoom and the Mouse

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