Voiceover cursor following mouse cursor flips me randomly down webpage

Question

Level 1

0 points

Voiceover cursor following mouse cursor flips me randomly down webpage

I am visually impaired, and my Macs are a godsend.

But after going from Leopard to Snow Leopard a couple weeks back, I have to ask ... did Apple break Voiceover on Safari?

Specifically, when I have VO on in Safari, I want it to read what's under the mouse cursor. Turned that on. I like going to Reddit and moving the cursor (giant pointer) over only the link titles to have them read to me. In Leopard, that's all that would be read, despite there being a thousand other little links throughout the page I wasn't concerned with VO locking on. Just the facts. Worked perfectly for 4 years.

Unfortunately with Snow Leopard, it's treating every single thing on the page as if I want to read it. I could live with that, but a side effect of this extreme over-reaction is that sometimes when I move my mouse cursor from link to link, VO thinks I want to flip down the webpage to a random position below, making me lose my place almost constantly. When I dry to scroll back up the page to whatever link I was reading, it fights me and flips back down.

I have turned on and off every single VO option in infinite combinations and cannot get VO to stop warping me down a page of links.

Is this a glitch? I don't want to use the Rotor to cycle through the thousands of unimportant links on my Reddit homepage just to read the 100 links that I can already see normally but can't get VO to stay on.

Please help, as having links read to me saves my tired eyes.
Being nonsensically warped hither and yon up and down a webpage so that I constantly lose my orientation on a simple list is nerve-wracking.

Imac, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Mar 19, 2011 11:22 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Mar 24, 2011 9:33 AM in response to Hugablindman

It sounds like you've got the auto-speak feature turned on. In VoiceOver Utility, select Web and uncheck "Automatically speak the web page."

Reply

Answer 2

Hugablindman Author

Level 1

0 points

Apr 19, 2011 11:11 AM in response to James Craig

No, it is not checked.

I have de-selected everything I can think of under Voiceover preferences EXCEPT "voiceover cursor follows mouse".

Any movement of the mouse pointer, such as from link to link, causes my position on the page to suddenly warp up or down the page, and I will lose my place.

I can't believe I'm the only person on the Internet who has this problem.

Reply

Answer 3

Hugablindman Author

Level 1

0 points

Apr 19, 2011 11:13 AM in response to Hugablindman

I don't have this problem when VoiceOver is turned off, so I don't believe it has anything to do with my mouse, which seems to work just fine.

Reply

Answer 4

Apr 30, 2011 6:15 AM in response to Hugablindman

I use VoiceOver (VO) because I am a slow and inadequate reader (dyslexia), LIke you I use vision and the mouse to navigate and the VO to do rapid, effortless Aural Reading. I have had the same problem that you report here. I can't get VO to work as well in Safari web pages as it did under earlier versions of the operating system (OS), but I have got a work around that is tolerable.

Under the earlier versions of MacOS and Safari, I could point with the mouse and the VO curser would follow where ever I put the mouse. This would let me, from where ever I was, switch over to keyboard navigation using the VO keys and arrow keys and navigate from that spot. This was great to use when I wanted to navigate through a list or a large page of paragraphs with out having to point to each item with the mouse. I could move the the keyboard navigation mode and rapidly move forward, move back, or enter the text block. In this mode, VO would occasionally jump to the top of the page between some paragraphs or links, but it would jump back to where I was reading with the next command to "read next", and this was not a problem. With the new OS this got all fouled up with the things you describe above, and I had to come up with a work-around. The work-around lets me use VO in Safari, but I have lost the functionality that I describe here. (Apple Accessibility, how can I get this functionality back with VO?)

With the new OS, Safari and my work-around I can now read text without VO jumping away from my reading spot. Here are the settings I have in my work-around. Under Navigation, I have (1) "Initial position of VoiceOver cursor" set to Keyboard focused item, (2) "Mouse cursor" set to Ignores VoiceOver cursor, (3) check (√) in check box for "VoiceOver cursor follows insertion point", (4) all other boxes on this page are un-checked. I think that #2 is the main change that stops the bouncing around.

If this does not result in a tolerable work-around for you let me know and I can send you my VO preferences file, and you can try it out. Mike

Reply

Answer 5

Aug 17, 2014 6:20 AM in response to Mike Matvy

I am currently using Mavericks, 10.9.4, and the workaround I reported earlier does not work. We are back to jumping around two previous sections on the page whenever the mouse is moved on a page.

This is very problematic because I lose my place on the page when I move my mouse and the voiceover (VO) cursor jumps my page to some other section. Also, at times I cannot get to certain places on a page because the voiceover cursor keeps jumping me to the top of some section. After this happens, I can scroll down to the paragraph, word, or button that I need to read, but as soon as I attempt to move the mouse over the text, or button, VoiceOver jumps me back to the top of that section. VO will not let me get to the part of the page that I need to read. In frustration, I usually turn VO off and use “Speak selected text when the key is pressed", but this is slow and laborsome. I will put up with it, but it is difficult to get my students to put up it.

I first started experiencing this problem two or three years ago with Safari and had no problems with Mail, Pages, TextEdit, etc. However, the later versions of Mail and Pages appeared to be redesigned, and they are doing this same thing. So far I’m not having the problem in TextEdit.

Is there a workaround?

I found a workaround by contacting Apple accessibility engineering . The short answer is :

A: set the mouse pointer option to "Ignores VoiceOver cursor" in VoiceOver Utility > Navigation.

The long answer is:

8-16-14

While Engineering investigates, the customer can use VoiceOver to read text under the mouse without causing the window to scroll by enabling the option "Speak text under the mouse after a delay" in VoiceOver Utility > Verbosity > Announcements, and setting the Mouse pointer option to "Ignores VoiceOver cursor" in VoiceOver Utility > Navigation. When visiting a new web page, VoiceOver will start reading from the top of the page, but this can be paused by pressing the Control key, then the customer can use the mouse to hover over text that they want VoiceOver to read. The amount of time it takes VoiceOver to start speaking the text under the cursor can be adjusted using the slider bar that appears under "Speak text under the mouse after a delay" in VoiceOver Utility.

Mike

Reply