
Regrettably, at this point, it does not appear that you can use Voice Control to execute VoiceOver commands in macOS Catalina. Comprehensive navigation is provided by navigation commands, names of accessibility labels, numbers, and grids.Īll audio processing for Voice Control will take place on your device, ensuring that your personal data is kept private.

Voice ControlĪ significant enhancement this year from Apple is a new Voice Control accessibility feature that allows users to fully control Mac, iOS, and iPadOS devices entirely with their voice. You can set up a custom group on either platform, and it should appear on all your macOS and iOS devices soon after. Symbols can be replaced with custom text, such as "left paren" in place of the left parenthesis skipped by VoiceOver and sent directly to the speech synthesizer in use, to be interpreted there instead or silently ignored altogether.Īs with some other features in macOS Catalina, this new punctuation setup is similar to that in iOS 13. Users can now create custom punctuation groups, in which each symbol can be specified. In 2017, Apple removed the "most" punctuation setting, leaving coders and those doing document editing with no good options for hearing the punctuation they needed.

This is not the case with macOS Catalina, which sees the introduction of some interesting–and potentially powerful–enhancements for blind and low vision users. Last year there were no big changes to VoiceOver or Zoom in macOS Mojave. If you are a braille user and have any experience with macOS Catalina and braille, please do post your findings in the comments.

We have no information as to how well braille works in this release, so please keep this in mind when upgrading.

There’s no harm in holding off a few weeks or months to let Apple address a problem you may find too disruptive to deal with.Ī note to braille users: the AppleVis team members doing testing with Catalina are not heavy braille users. Please remember to check the section about bugs to see if now is the right time to upgrade.
#MACOS CATALINA FEATURES MAC#
For an overview of the mainstream changes, we recommend that you read this indepth review of Catalina by Mac Stories. As usual, we won’t cover the mainstream features here, concentrating instead on what's new and changed for blind and low vision users. Apple has today released macOS 10.15 Catalina to the public.
