macOS Golden Gate 27 Beta 3 Megathread

Hi all. Posting from beta 3 and Google Chrome.

I've set up beta 3 as a new Mac and am trying to configure the Mail client. In the composition window, I cannot get rid of the formatting toolbar. It's between the subject field and the message body. If I tab and shift+tab between those two, I skip over the formatting toolber. But if I VO+arrow from one to the other, I end up in a maze of useless formatting buttons, all the same.

Switching the email to plain text doesn't get rid of the toolbar. Changing default message format to plain text in setting also has no effect.

Does macOS still allow to adjust grouping behavior? If so, it might be possible to go into your settings and adjust that, so that you're not always hitting that particular formatting bar.

HTH.

I checked the status of a couple of text editing bugs. They're still ppresent.

Bug #1: VO Move to and read next paragraph fails when it encounters a block of short, one-line paragraphs, common in fiction dialog. In this case, VO behaves as if it has reached the end of the document. The workaround is to use your powers of ESP to divine that the end of the document hasn't been reached and proceed through the remaining text with the down arrow key.

Bug #2: Date-like text is still misinterpreted as dates, and VO reading of dates often bears little resemblance to the structure of the actual date text. The only way to comprehend how the text is actually written is to left and right arrow through the characters. Optionally, you can try changing the VO Utility setting that reads numbers as words, but I can't tolerate this setting long enough to determine if it actually resolves all the different date failure modes I've encountered.

I had hoped these issues stemmed from the fact that I haven't done a clean Mac setup in 17 years. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be the case.

In beta 3, they added options to announce line numbers, errors, warnings, breakpoints, etc., in xCode. Not sure about other IDEs, but the feature description clearly describes xCode, and doesn't mention other places this is available in. Let's hope there are APIs to extend this to third-party programs, but my expectations aren’t heightened.

That coding thing would be fantastic but I do worry about how it is likely to be only available in xcode. For example, as far as I know the Coding activity context is only available there. But I would love this sort of thing.

Regarding bug fixes - this Mac OS release was being billed as the new Snow Leopard but I am getting worried that it hasn't actually fixed anything at all with VoiceOver. Is there anything better at all in terms of quality?

This was PEBKAC, of course.

Open a new message. Turn on the toolbar with command+option+T. Find the format button inside that toolbar. Select it or unselect it, I guess.

Sorry. As I set up this clean Golden Gate install, I'll probably run into a lot of issues that straddle the line between Golden Gate bugs and just poor/unclear design.

I've encountered several text fields for which there is no VoiceOver echo while typing. Just ran into this with the Mail app while setting up a new mail account; no keyboard echo while typing the incoming and outgoing mail server names.

Interestingly, I see the same issue in the "Ask Anything" field of the ChatGPT desktop website with the latest version of Chrome, both for Golden Gate and Tahoe. This tells me the problem is more than just a Golden Gate regression.

I've noticed something similar in Tahoe. It's particularly noticeable in modal dialogs. Firstly, I have groups disabled, but on a modal dialog you have to interact with "Dialog" to get in it (which is a new thing in Tahoe), and then often the first text box won't echo the typing, and that's particularly troublesome if you want to use the cursor keys to check what's been entered. I think turning VoiceOver off and on again fixes it.

I can't imagine using a Mac without having it echo back the keys as you type them because it seems quite erratic as to whether it's typing or not. Quite often you'll hear VoiceOver rabbit on about how "to enter text, type" or whatever, and you'll do just that and nothing will appear until you do a little VO focus dance to get it actually there. Or it will be putting the text into the box and just not telling you.

But the modal dialog thing seems to be a very specific behaviour. I've been vibe coding a few native Mac apps and I regularly have this problem and have sometimes had to rethink the interface entirely to work around it. Maybe that's my igorance but I do see it in other places so I'm not sure it is in this case.

Anyway this might not be what you're seeing ini the new "fixed all the bugs" version of MacOs but it sounds similar.

I am the only one talking about those.
They are there since tahoe beta 1.
Go to braille --> braille display - braille keyboard input, customize command, pick a random cell, and when you brows in the list of all possible commands you can assign you'll see a new developer category that apparently aim at giving some voiceover debugging info to the user, but there is no other official way of accessing it to despite, unsurprisingly, a lot of feedbacks sent since june 2026.

Okay, I finally found type to SIRI, buried under accessibility for some reason. I turned it on. The only way to invoke it seems to be VO+M, M, then select SIRI.

Type your prompt. SIRI displays a response but does not speak it, regardless of the setting of SIRI responses. You can navigate to it with VoiceOver, but it's tedious.

I experienced the same issue after I upgraded from Sequoia to Tahoe 26.5 about six weeks ago. I thought certainly this was some oddball thing that only I was experiencing, as no one else on AppleVis appeared to have encountered it.

But here I am, clean Golden Gate install, with the same issue. A head-scratcher.

I have multiple mail accounts, so I created a smart mailbox, "All Inboxes," to display an aggregate of messages in all inboxes, as the name implies. One of the accounts is a GMail account.

While viewing messages in All Inboxes, I move a message to a GMail folder/label. The message disappears as expected. I confirm it has moved by viewing the folder/label.

When I return to All Inboxes, the message has reappeared.

As a workaround, move the message from the *actual* GMail inbox, not the smart mailbox.

This problem doesn't occur on Tahoe with an identically configured smart mailbox.

I opened a feedback report on this one.