Apple Releases OS X 10.10.3

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Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Today, Apple released OS X 10.10.3 to the public, marking the third major update to the OS X Yosemite operating system.

According to Apple's release notes via iMore, OS X 10.10.3 includes the following new features and changes:

The OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 update includes the new Photos app and improves the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac.

With Photos you can:

  • Browse your photos by time and location in Moments, Collections, and Years views
  • Navigate your library using convenient Photos, Shared, Albums, and Projects tabs
  • Store all of your photos and videos in iCloud Photo Library in their original format and in full resolution
  • Access your photos and videos stored in iCloud Photo Library from your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or iCloud.com with any web browser
  • Perfect your photos with powerful and easy-to-use editing tools that optimize with a single click or slider, or allow precise adjustments with detailed controls
  • Create professional-quality photo books with simplified bookmaking tools, new Apple-designed themes, and new square book formats
  • Purchase prints in new square and panoramic sizes

It's easy to upgrade your iPhoto library to Photos - just launch the app to get started. To learn more about Photos, please visit: http://www.apple.com/osx/photos/

This update also includes the following improvements:

  • Adds over 300 new Emoji characters
  • Adds Spotlight suggestions to Look up
  • Prevents Safari from saving website favicon URLs used in Private Browsing
  • Improves stability and security in Safari
  • Improves WiFi performance and connectivity in various usage scenarios
  • Improves compatibility with captive Wi-Fi network environments
  • Fixes an issue that may cause Bluetooth devices to disconnect
  • Improves screen sharing reliability

While we have no definitive information on any accessibility changes in OS X 10.10.3, AppleVis Editorial Team member and mac user Mehgcap noted the following observations:

  • The Emoji picker has been redesigned. It is still usable, but is not as easy to use as in previous OS X releases. I'd advise switching to the "large window" before you do anything else. Use the tables to find the item you want, being sure to interact with each table /grid to get at its contents. VO-spacing on any emoji will insert it, but the emoji picker will stay open. You must find the Close button at the top of the window--Escape, enter, cmd-w, and other commands don't seem to work.
  • Nuance voice delay is a bit better, and the VoiceOver Utility should no longer be a pain to browse when using any Vocalizer voice. Overall, Vocalizer's response time should be a bit less, if this bug is something that has affected you so far.
  • We can't say for sure, but it looks like the problem where VoiceOver would fail to read some PDFs has been fixed. If you find any PDF problems, or find that PDFs you couldn't read in Yosemite so far are now working, please leave a comment.
  • If you use the Alex voice, or other Mac defaults like Fred, you may notice the phrase "object replacement character" being spoken before Finder tags, items in "Open Recent" menus, and other locations.
  • The bug where using Safari's "Back" command would sometimes result in a page that VoiceOver could not read appears to be fixed. However, the key word there is "sometimes"; this bug may simply be hiding and not truly gone. We are calling it fixed for the moment, but if you encounter it, please leave a comment.

A quick review of the new Photos app shows VoiceOver reading the controls, and able to manage photo collections and groups. Remember that "has alternate items" means you can vo-cmd-space and choose to show those items from the menu, and that in this app, interacting is definitely your friend. Beyond this, however, we have little information, as none of us use Photos enough to provide detailed feedback.

OS X 10.10.3 is available through Software Update or by selecting the Updates tab in the Mac App Store.

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21 Comments

Time Machine

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Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

The unlabeled and unknown buttons in the Time Machine controls have been corrected.

Safari webpage reading focus

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Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

When reading text on a webpage with the left and right arrow keys, and then pressing VO H or VO shift H, Voiceover now correctly switches focus so the text you arrow through changes in response to your move to a heading. This is described perhaps more articulately on the features and bugs of OS X Yosemite list at the following link. http://www.applevis.com/blog/apple-mac-os-x-news/features-and-bugs-os-x-...

latest update

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does anyone know if in the latest update the bug where safari would sometimes say new tab when you first opened to to read a webpage or brows is fixed? this only happens sometimes where when you open safari vo says newt instead of focusing on the html window.

google chrome accessibility is back

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Club AppleVis Member

Hi, many of us claimed that with OSX Yosemite, Chrome was no longer usable via VoiceOver, because of interaction problems: for example you could get HTML contents to be read by using tab key, but then you could not explore the web page with VO+arrows, or compiling forms, or so.
Well, Chrome now seems to properly work since 10.10.3! The only, big, problem Chrome still has, is on tables.
If you have a complex table in a web page, when you enter it, VoiceOver does not read contents of columns and rows; it enters table but stays just silent till you go out from it.

A Quick Question...

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Hello! I have been wanting to update to Yosemite but have not yet. Is this update relatively on par with Mavricks as far as Voiceover usability and reliability? Thanks!

Yeah, I believe that VO is

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Yeah, I believe that VO is now about the same than mavericks. I would update it if you wish. You'll get other answers, but I would honestly update.

Thanks!

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Thank you! I think I will give it a try!

Yeah! it's completely up to

Submitted by on

Yeah! it's completely up to you. Just remember to back up everything before you go incase you don't like it.

Just Updated

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Hi all. I just updated to 10.10.3 about 15 minutes ago. The Back command in Safari worked for me both times I tried it. I haven't checked out Chrome yet, will do that later. I did, however, get a spoken notification about the new photo app and am wondering if it is safe to uninstall the old ones? I was able to navigate between buttons in this notification just fine. This looks like a great update.

Not a smooth update for me

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Club AppleVis Member

I hope my experience is an anomaly, but my Mac mini is not liking this OS update.

The first time I tried to install the update, the installer got hung up, forcing me to restore from a Time Machine backup to get my computer up and running again. A second attempt a couple of days later was successful, however.

After the update, the Mac asked me to re-enter my Gmail password, and I got an email from Gmail warning me that someone tried to access my account using a less secure method and that the access was blocked. The info provided in the email made it clear that my Mac was responsible for this. Fortunately, I did not have to do anything special to get things working, as my computer continues to get mail from Gmail just fine after I re-entered my password.

As for Safari, I can confirm that the Back button issue is fixed. However, on at least a couple of websites I visited, VoiceOver had major problems navigating the site. Navigating by headings failed miserably, and VoiceOver kept moving focus to seemingly random places on the site. This reminded me of VoiceOver's behavior in Safari under iOS 7 on the iPad, and I never expected to encounter anything like it on the Mac. It is ironic that Safari on iOS is now behaving much better for me than on the Mac, a complete reversal from the days before iOS 8 and Yosemite.

It is possible that there's something screwed up with my Mac mini, so I may try a fresh install of Yosemite to see if that clears things up.

Try a fresh install. As for

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Try a fresh install. As for your gmail issue its ssl certificate expired last weekend. You might want to do a full clean install and a permission repair as I'm not having any issues at all.

Tables in Safai

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Hi,
Is it just me, or is Safari behaving very strangely when navigating tables on web pages in the latest Safari? On many pages VO just gets stuck when I try to read a table. Some forum sites and similar are especially bad. Is there something I can do about this?

Tables in Safari, and Confirming Chrome

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First off, I'd like to confirm that Google Chrome does seem to work again with VO. Regarding the table issue in Safari with 10.10.3, this happened to me on the American Foundation for the Blind's site when trying to read the latest issue of "AccessWorld." I haven't tried out any other sites containing tables since I updated, and I'm going to go back to the email update which I received from the AFB and try accessing "AccessWorld" from there and see what happens. I'll also try with Chrome. But perhaps you should report this issue to accessibility@apple.com . Update: I had some time to kill just a little bit ago so I revisited this issue. The "AccessWorld" site doesn't work correctly in VO when launching it directly from Safari, but it did work for me when just clicking on the article links in the email. Then I went into System Preferences, under General, and switched the default browser to Chrome. Chrome worked fine on that site both in the email and when launching the site directly from within the browser. So something odd is definitely going on here. I'm honestly debating whether to report this issue to the accessibility folks at Apple, or just let it slide. To me it really isn't that big of a deal, because Safari does work. It's just this one small quirk that is present, but to each his own.

Report

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Yes, I'm going to report it to Apple. It's a very annoying problem.

Rotor with Braille displays

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I have a Focus 14 Braille display. On iOs, there is a shortcut to move through the different options in the rotor item I selected which is space bar+dot 3 or 6. This is not working on OS X and as you would understand it is not productive to go back and fort from the keyboard to the display. I eared from a developer that this bugs is present since the first beta of Yosemite, it was reported and I also did and stills no being fixed

I think there might be an

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I think there might be an option in VO utility for web rotor where you can possibly add things. Or, maybe that is only in iOS where you can select and deselect options in the VO rotor menu in VO settings. I honestly don't use the rotor at all. You press CTRL+option+U to access the rotor menus, go to the button menu with VO right arrow, and find the button you want then press VO space on the button. I think that is right, they've changed the rotor, how it reads using the keyboard. I've never noticed that before, use the track pad commander with rotor. Actually thats a whole lot easier.

Regarding the rotor yeah you

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Regarding the rotor yeah you can change things in vo utility then web. and dont' press vo space on th button, link, etc bu press enter twice. That aso works as well and is for me a lot faster You can also type in your choice in the button, link, etc section until you filter it to a few choices. it's rad man. Lol!