so, I just realized one of the biggest reasons I don't like macos voiceover is text selection, I thought the voiceover+enter shortcut is completely broken, until someone told me that it isn't and he uses it in terminal a lot, I was surprised, so I tried, and yes, it does work, however.
I've noticed some qwerks, places where it works and it doesn't, and there is also another mode that confuses me, apparently, according to voiceover help, multiple selection mode or something? I don't understand that.
is there a guide somewhere, and could someone tell me the edge cases and qwerks this thing has? Because a lot of people complain about it, but this is much better for me personally. Because I genuinely thought text selection was flat out impossible previously. So while I' maware it's not perfect, this is much beter than flat out having no copying lol.
By emperor limitless, 26 June, 2025
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
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Unfortunately, yes, text…
Unfortunately, yes, text selection on web and within pdf especially is really really broken with voiceover, that's why I force myself to use safari whenever possible as most of the times I can select whatever I need with keyboard.
It's technically possible, if you have a decent clipboard manager or, to do vo shift c to copy each spoken line in to the clipboard and then use a clipboard manager to concatenate everything...
But the doc is indeed completely useless or irrelevent as even the voiceover native selection with pinch close and open on the trackpad with static text, line, words, characters, or other.... is broken outside plain html pages.
Maybe with apple script some automation could be possible but this is outside of my knowledge currently. The best we can do is to feedback apple about this basic thing that's so broken, and is literally why aside some specific apps I will still keep windows around. It's not really an architecture problem either as chromevox on chromeos manages selection brilliantly and is as flawless as it could be for my need, which VoiceOver isn't on the mac, its ios/ipados counterpart is better because there they did the right thing and VO can parse and select and probably copy its own stuff independent of any js block on the web or something... Not that it's perfect, but it's far more reliable than what we currently have on mac.
I hope somebody else can help you better, but as far as I know, there is no real solution currently.
The multiple selection vo cmd return is meant to work inside native apps like finder where we can select file 1, pass by file 2, and add file 3 to the selection, like the ctrl space, ctrl down arrow twice, ctrl space on the 3rd item we do in windows explorer.
HTH.
interesting
indeed unfortunate and interesting, perhaps I'll report this, after all, the more reports we have about a specific issue, the more likely something will be done about it.
it's somewhat amusing how this issue singlehandedly held back like 30% of newcoming macos users, like I love macos, but it genuinely feels awkward when I want to select something to copy only to blance and go uh I can't. Safari caret nav somewhat solves this problem, but if voiceover selection consistantly works in all apps this is going to be much, much better than ever. I'm wishing for the safari thing to be consistant in all apps, but I think that might be unrealistic because that's not how macos works.
No, I personally want the VO…
No, I personally want the VO own selection command to just work everywhere and this is how I am personally trying to get apple to do.