What Customizations Have You Made to VoiceOver and macOS?

I have VoiceOver's focus to synchronize and it works really great.

I also have VoiceOver speak out links as sounds.

Set everything I can to sounds instead of speech, capital letters, links, more content, etc., same on the iPhone. VOCR is a must have, I’ve set group navigation to ignore for most apps except for logic pro and other such complex apps, And synchronized focus between the mouse cursor and voiceover as well as keyboard focus and voiceover. look at the verbocity section of voiceover, you’ll be able to get a lot of bang for your buck with a couple of setting adjustments. I’m still on macOS Sonoma so I haven’t got command customization, but if I were you I would set it to be as similar to NVDA as possible to reduce friction between platforms when switching back-and-forth. One more thing, I added custom pronunciations for all the punctuation I could to make it more similar to NVDA

Below is a list of some things I've done to customize VoiceOver to best suit my needs:

Verbosity

• Change default speech verbosity level to medium
• Set "While typing speak" to characters
• Set "When text attributes change" and "when encountering a misspelled word" to "do nothing"
• Deselected "Speak header when navigating across a table row" checkbox
• Set "When status text changes under VoiceOver cursor" to "speak text"
• Set "When progress indicator changes under VoiceOver cursor" to "speak update"
• Deselected "Speak instructions for using the item in the VoiceOver cursor" checkbox
• Set "When an item has a help tag" to "do nothing"

Speech

• Changed voice to Alex
• Changed speech rate to 60%

Navigation

• Maintained standard grouping behavior
• Set mouse pointer to ignore Voiceover cursor

Web

• Deselected "Speak column and row numbers when navigating web tables" checkbox
• Selected "Enable live regions" checkbox, created activity to disable them for certain websites
• Set "While a webpage loads" to "do nothing"

Sound

• Deselected "Enable audio ducking" checkbox

VoiceOver recognition

• Selected "Image descriptions" checkbox, focus on an image and press VO-Shift-L to generate a description

In addition, I've created the following custom commands to streamline my workflow and reduce the number of keystrokes needed to perform common tasks:

• Option-C: Open Calculator
• Option-D: Open Dictionary
• Option-E: Open Messages
• Option-F: Run a shortcut I created to toggle one of my HomeKit accessories, a smart plug, on and off
• Option-I: Open Microsoft Teams
• Option-M: Open Mail
• Option-P: Open Pages
• Option-S: Open Safari
• Option-T: Speak the time
• Option-Y: Open the Text Checker
• Option-Z: Open Zoom

I have turned off groupings by default, set verbosity to low, turned off all visuals and set sounds for most things instead of speech.

I also have synchornising the text cursor with VO cursor as enabled and mouse with VO as disabled. (Not sure what the defaults are)

I have created a few activities:

Hierarchical mode - puts grouping back to Standard, attached to all the Apple first party apps I hate using like App Store, Shortcuts etc. (But not Mail, Finder and Safari)

Slow Down - for those times when VO is blathering on and I can't make sense of it. A slower voice using Siri.

Coding - for PyCharm and VS Code. Speaks punctuation, bleeps for indentation etc.

Commentary Mode - this changes VO output so it always comes out of the Mac speakers. Useful for when I'm listening to football commentary and air playing with my speaker. I switch to this so I don't suddenly have VO blurting out around my house.

I have done a lot of customisation under Commands. It was a bit easier to explain when it was commanders. But I have it set so holding down right option + various letters will switch to apps. So S for Safari, M for Mail etc. You can also do variations with Shift. So Have G for Chrome, and Shift+G for Edge and a few others. And I have shortcuts on the number keys to toggle numpad commander, screen curtain etc.

I've also done a lot with the numpad commands. So I can use the numpad numbers on their own to move my VO cursor around, or hold down numpad 0 to navigate by headings etc. I setup numpad 0+enter so that it tells me what element I'm currently in. This helps when you have Low verbosity, so I can just check if I need to know, otherwise I can largely ignore it.

Also, remember if you are in VO Utility you can use the normal VO+M menu to export your settings, reset to factory defaults or import. Useful if you are making a lot of changes.

The main thing I've done, and is a feature I love, is keyboard command customisation.
I like to have a kind of system in place, so I use Option plus a letter to open apps, Option plus Shift plus a letter for other actions. And one or two others.
Some examples:
Option plus M opens Mail.
Option plus S opens Safari.
Option plus T opens Teams.
Option plus W opens WhatsApp.
Option plus A opens App Store.
Option plus Shift plus A opens the application chooser menu, which I find easier than Control plus Option plus F1 twice.
Option plus Shift plus W opens the window chooser menu, which I similarly find is easier than Control plus Option plus F2 twice.
Control plus Option plus F12 to speak the time.
Control plus Option plus F12 twice to speak battery percentage.
Dave

Most have to do with keyboard commands:
Lowering brightness to 0%
Screen curtain on/off
Volume level through 10% to 100%
Command to esse the navigation through tables
Command to navigate through sentences and paragraphs
And many others! I have a list of something around 40 keyboard commands.
Also made customised activities that are either triggered automatically when I launch WhatsApp and other apps or manually activated when I do other stuff like proofreading and so on.

Here are some of the options:
1. typing echo set to nothing
2. Mispelled words set to nothing
3. deleting text as well as links set to change pitch
and other settings I left alone.