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PaulSpr

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 14, 2013
65
6
My nephew is blind and uses VoiceOver on his Mac. But he is running into certain issues. The one that is most easily reproducible (at least on his machines) is an extremely slow Save Dialog and I have no idea on how to fix this. He's running macOS 10.12.3.

The problem is that navigating between the UI items (by using ctrl+alt+[arrow left/right] is extremely slow. As in: the transition between 2 buttons can take up to 10 seconds and sometimes more). It only seems to happen when the advanced save/export dialog (toggled by the arrow button next to the filename textfield).

Weird thing is; He has this problem on his old MacBook Pro and his new (as in, a few weeks old) MacBook Air. But when I try this on my new MacBook Pro it works flawlessly. Did some testing around the office and several (but not all) colleagues ran into the problem as well (Mac Minis, iMacs and MacBook Pros). We have several machines that are hardware wise exactly the same (with the same language settings) and the problem occurred on one machine, but not the other...

So at first we thought it was a config thing, so I did a low level erase of the SSD (the "Macintosh HD" volume), reformatted and re-installed macOS, didn't do a restore, didn't sign into iCloud at any point or even make an internet connection of any kind, but the problem still persists.

As I said it's easily reproducible, but it's only triggered in specific conditions which are exactly the way a blind person would use a Mac.

Even if you can't help us, I would appreciate if you could try the following (takes about 2 minutes) and post your results including the hardware used. I've written up these steps as if your not a VoiceOver user. My system language is Dutch so some menu and button items our rough-educated-guesses translations.

1) Don't start VoiceOver yet, but open TextEdit.
2) Create a new file and type something like "VoiceOver is really cool when it works properly".
3) Start VoiceOver by hitting fn+cmd+F5 and hit "Use VoiceOver" if a dialog appears.
4) Just use your mouse cursor to navigate to the File menu
5) Now use your arrow keys (this is important, if you use the mouse the issue won't consistently occur) and navigate to "Export to PDF"(in some cases you might need to user ctrl+alt with the arrow keys) and hit enter/return
6) The dialog opens, if it's in easy mode click the arrow next to the filename field, close the dialog and repeat from step 4. If it's already in advanced mode, continue to step 7.
7) You can navigate between the UI items using ctrl+alt+[right arrow] and ctrl+alt+[left arrow]. Try to quickly navigate around. Does it feel fast or super slow? What happens when you repeat step 4 to 7?
8) Close VoiceOver by hitting fn+cmd+F5

I'm curious to your experiences.
 
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