This was working a few days ago, but it has since stopped and I can't figure out why. I've tried resetting TCC, double-checking my entitlements, restarting, deleting and rebuilding, and nothing works. My app is a sandboxed macOS SwiftUI LSUIElement app that, when invoked, checks to see if the frontmost process is Terminal, then tries to get the frontmost window’s title. func getFrontmostWindowTitle() throws -> String? { let trusted = AXIsProcessTrusted() print("getFrontmostWindowTitle AX trusted: \(trusted)") guard let app = NSWorkspace.shared.frontmostApplication else { return nil } let appElement = AXUIElementCreateApplication(app.processIdentifier) var focusedWindow: AnyObject? let status = AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue(appElement, kAXFocusedWindowAttribute as CFString, &focusedWindow) guard status == .success, let window = focusedWindow else { if status == .cannotComplete { throw Errors.needAccessibilityPermission } return nil } var title: AnyObject? let titleStatus = AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue(window as! AXUIElement, kAXTitleAttribute as CFString, &title) guard titleStatus == .success else { return nil } return title as? String } I recently renamed the app, but the Bundle ID has not yet changed. I have com.apple.security.accessibility set to YES in the Entitlements file (although i had to add it manually), and a NSAccessibilityUsageDescription string set in Info.plist. The first time I ran this, macOS nicely prompted for permission. Now it won't do that, even when I use AXIsProcessTrustedWithOptions() to try to force it. If I use tccutil to reset accessibility and apple events, it still doesn't prompt. If I drag my app from the build products folder to System Settings, it gets added to the system TCC DB (not the user DB). It shows an auth value of 2 for my app: % sudo sqlite3 "/Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db" "SELECT client,auth_value FROM access WHERE service='kTCCServiceAccessibility' OR service='kTCCServiceAppleEvents';" com.latencyzero.<redacted>|2 <redactd> I'm at a loss as to what went wrong. I proved out the concept earlier and it worked, and have since spent a lot of time enhancing and polishing the app, and now things aren't working and I'm starting to worry.

I have users who need to be able to hear the content of SwiftUI Text views. I have specified the .textSelection(.enabled) modifier for the text views. Adding this modifier causes a "copy" option to appear on long press, but it doesn't enable the visible selection of text, nor does it provide the "Speak" menu item that UIKit allows on text selection. Is the "Speak Selection" accessibility feature broken for SwiftUI Text views? I've found that there's another accessibility feature that does work (enabling the Speech Controller button for "Speak Screen"). Do I need to tell my users that Apple is deprecating the "Speak Selection" accessibility feature, and that they need to use the Speech Controller instead? Or is there something else I can do to my SwiftUI to get that feature to work?

I have been working to remediate PDFs for a client. The documents/forms have many tables. When I correctly tag a table, using Foxit Editor Pro, it works beautifully on a PC reading it with NVDA. On Mac using VoiceOver the table isn't accessible. It doesn't matter if I try to read it in Adobe Acrobat, Foxit, or Preview. The reader often says the document is empty, omits column headers, and/or associates the wrong header with the column data. The documents have essentially the same coding behind them as for the web. Why is it they perform so well on a PC with NVDA, but so poorly with Mac VoiceOver? I am a Quality Assurance Specialist. I review websites apps, and documents for accessibility. Why can't I do my job using only my Mac system? As a Mac user, it frustrates me that I can't use my preferred system for checking documents to see if they are accessible because VoiceOver doesn't work well. I actually have to recommend to my clients and their customers that they need to use a PC with NVDA or Jaws for these documents to be able to get all the information. Unfortunately, most people aren't able to have, or maintain, both systems. Overall, Mac products are very high quality. This, and other issues with VoiceOver, seems to be a large gap in Apple's offerings and functionality. I would appreciate a human response to the original email I sent about this on 7/30/2025.

Our application, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gamecontroller-mapper/id6737088417 which maps game controller inputs to keyboard/mouse events system-wide, has stopped functioning properly after the macOS 15.4 update. Specifically, the app can no longer capture game controller inputs when running in the background, severely impacting its core functionality. Environment macOS version: 15.4 Previous working versions: All versions prior to 15.4 App type: Background utility with accessibility permissions Hardware: All game controller brands compatible with macOS Detailed Description Before macOS 15.4 Our application correctly captured game controller inputs from any brand connected to Mac and successfully translated them to keyboard/mouse events system-wide. Users could control any application (e.g., scrolling through documents in Preview using controller buttons) while our app ran in the background with the accessibility permissions granted. After macOS 15.4 The application only works when it has active focus (is in the foreground). When any other application gains focus, our app completely stops receiving or detecting any input events from the game controller while running in the background. For instance, pressing the 'down' button on the controller while another app is active results in no event being registered within our application. We've tried updating the app to work in accessory mode (in the menubar), but the issue persists. Steps to Reproduce Install our application on macOS 15.3 or earlier Grant accessibility permissions when prompted Connect a compatible game controller (e.g., Xbox or other controller) Open another application (e.g., Preview with a PDF document) Press buttons on the controller to navigate the document without touching the keyboard Expected result on 15.3: Controller inputs are translated to keyboard events, even when our app is in the background Upgrade to macOS 15.4 Repeat steps 2-5 Actual result on 15.4: Controller inputs are only translated to keyboard events when our application has focus Technical Implementation Our app uses: CGEvent.tapCreate() to create a global event tap CGEvent for simulating keyboard and mouse events GCController.extendedGamepad?.valueChangedHandler for detecting controller inputs Proper NSAccessibilityUsageDescription and appropriate entitlements GCController.shouldMonitorBackgroundEvents = true to ensure controller events continue when the app is inactive Possible Relation to Recent Changes We noticed in the macOS 15.4 Release Notes: Game Controller - Resolved Issues: Fixed: Game controllers might stop responding when accessibility features, such as Voice Over, are enabled. (141497799) We suspect this fix might have introduced a regression or intentional limitation affecting applications like ours that rely on background event simulation with game controller input. Impact This change severely impacts: Applications designed to use game controllers as assistive input devices for users who may have difficulty using traditional keyboard and mouse inputs Applications for media control, presentation navigation, and other similar use cases Users who rely on our application for accessibility purposes Questions Is this an intentional security change or an unintended side effect of the controller fix mentioned in the release notes? Are there any new APIs or alternative approaches we should implement to restore functionality? If this is a system bug, when can we expect a fix? We would greatly appreciate any guidance on how to restore our application's functionality. Thank you for your assistance.

AVPlayer has 3 visual accessibility issues with videos out of the box: The contrast fails for the current time in the video The contrast fails for the remaining time in the video The hit area is too small for the time slider. The WCAG AA requirement is a minimum hit size of 24 x 24. The height of the hit area of the offending region is 8. Is there a known fix for any of these? This can be reproduced with this code in an app playground: import SwiftUI import AVKit import UIKit struct ContentView: View { private let video = URL(string: "https://server15700.contentdm.oclc.org/dmwebservices/index.php?q=dmGetStreamingFile/p15700coll2/15.mp4/byte/json")! @State private var player: AVPlayer? var body: some View { VStack { VideoPlayerView(player: player) .frame(maxWidth: .infinity, maxHeight: 200) } .task { player = try? await loadPlayer(video: video) } } } private struct VideoPlayerView: UIViewControllerRepresentable { let player: AVPlayer? func makeUIViewController(context: Context) -> AVPlayerViewController { let controller = AVPlayerViewController() controller.player = player controller.modalPresentationStyle = .overFullScreen return controller } func updateUIViewController(_ uiViewController: AVPlayerViewController, context: Context) { uiViewController.player = player } } private func loadPlayer(video: URL) async throws -> AVPlayer { let videoAsset = AVURLAsset(url: video) let videoPlusSubtitles = AVMutableComposition() try await videoPlusSubtitles.add(videoAsset, withMediaType: .video) try await videoPlusSubtitles.add(videoAsset, withMediaType: .audio) return await AVPlayer(playerItem: AVPlayerItem(asset: videoPlusSubtitles)) } private extension AVMutableComposition { func add(_ asset: AVAsset, withMediaType mediaType: AVMediaType) async throws { let duration = try await asset.load(.duration) try await asset.loadTracks(withMediaType: mediaType).first.map { track in let newTrack = self.addMutableTrack(withMediaType: mediaType, preferredTrackID: kCMPersistentTrackID_Invalid) let range = CMTimeRangeMake(start: .zero, duration: duration) try newTrack?.insertTimeRange(range, of: track, at: .zero) } } }

I'm looking into how to programmatically control color filters in the Accessibility settings under "System Settings" -> "Accessibility" -> "Color Filters"--in particular the "Intensity" and "Filter type" settings. As far as I have gathered, changing this setting can only be accomplished using the CoreGraphics APIs or Accessibility APIs (I've poked around GitHub, Stack Overflow, and queried some LLMs), but there doesn't seem to be a clear cut example for doing this using public facing APIs, without ripping off source code from another project wholesale or using private APIs. My goal is to overlay a color filter at either a per-application or system level to help with accessibility. If there's a way to overlay this capability on an application-by-application basis as a third-party developer, that would be the most ideal scenario. For example, modifying the look and feel/UX for Launchpad, Photos, etc, as a third-party developer without accessing the source code of the application that I'm modifying the look/feel for (with appropriate user consent of course).

Many of us Bangladeshi iPhone users were upset when Apple changed the font to Bangla in the most recent iOS version (18.4.1). We prefer the old Bangla typeface. I want the old Bangla typeface to return, and so do we. Please consider this.

Hi, I've wrapped AVRoutePickerView in SwiftUI using pretty much the code given here, with a few changes: func makeUIView(context: Context) -> UIView { let routePickerView = AVRoutePickerView() // Configure the button's color. //routePickerView.delegate = context.coordinator //routePickerView.backgroundColor = .secondarySystemBackground routePickerView.tintColor = .accent routePickerView.activeTintColor = .accent // Indicate whether your app prefers video content. routePickerView.prioritizesVideoDevices = false return routePickerView } I commented out routePickerView.delegate = context.coordinator because it doesn't compile; context.coordinator is of type Void and I'm not sure how to fix that. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with the issue. Anyway, this works fine without VoiceOver; if I tap the button, I get the AirPlay popover. But in VoiceOver, if I select the button and double-tap, nothing happens… it just reads the button's accessibilityLabel again. How can I get the AirPlay popover to show in VoiceOver?

I made a (very simple) custom tab bar in SwiftUI. It's simply an HStack containing two buttons. These buttons control the selection of a paged TabView. This works well, but in VoiceOver they don't behave like the bottom tab bar or e.g. a segmented picker. Specifically, VoiceOver does not say something like "tab one of two" when the first button is focused. According to my research, in UIKit this can be accomplished by giving the container view the accessibility trait tabBar, hiding it as an accessibility element and give it the accessibility container type semanticGroup. In SwiftUI, there is also the trait isTabBar, but that does not seem to have any impact for VoiceOver. I don't see an equivalent of semanticGroup in SwiftUI. I tried accessibilityElement(children: .contain) but that also does not seem to have any impact. So, is there any way in SwiftUI to make a button behave like a tab-button in VoiceOver? And how is SwiftUI's isTabBar accessibility trait supposed to be used?

accessibilityUserInputLabels is working fine with any view I tried this on. Meaning that the control can be toggled with the provided alternative names when using Voice Control. When setting this property on any UIBarButtonItem though, it seems Voice Control ignores the alternative names provided by setting accessibilityUserInputLabels. For comparison, accessibilityLabel works perfectly when set on UIBarButtonItem. Is anyone facing the same issue? Using Xcode 16.0 (16A242) on iOS 18

I'm developing a macOS app using NSView and trying to make my content navigable via VoiceOver. I'm expecting the built-in rotor category "Content Chooser" (accessed via VO + U) to list my accessible elements — just like how it shows message items in the Mail app. However, in my app, this rotor appears empty, even though: My views return proper accessibilityChildren() or accessibilityContents() with valid NSAccessibilityElements Each child has correct AXRole, AXLabel, etc. The window is key and visible VoiceOver navigation works for the elements I've also tried: Using both accessibilityChildren() and accessibilityContents() in container views Setting roles like .group, .staticText, .button, etc. Avoiding hidden elements Ensuring all elements are visible and labeled Still, "Content Chooser" rotor is empty. What exact conditions must be met for an element to appear in the "Content Chooser" rotor in a macOS app? Any Apple-specific guidance, hidden requirements, or sample code would be appreciated.

Hello, I am a student studying accessibility. I aim to analyze the smartphone usage patterns of visually impaired individuals. Therefore, I would like to log the VoiceOver usage records of visually impaired iPhone users. Is there a way to output VoiceOver logs, similar to the AccessibilityService API on Android? Thank you in advance for your responses.

In some places of our app we make use of NSAccessibilityElement subclasses to vend some extra items to accessibility clients. We need to know which item has the VoiceOver focus so we can keep track of it. setAccessibilityFocused: does not get called when accessibility clients focus NSAccessibilityElements. This method is only called when accessibility clients focus view-based accessibility elements (i.e. when a NSView subclass gets focused). At the same time we need to programmatically move VoiceOver focus to those items when something happens. Those accessibility elements inherit from NSObject so we can't make them first responder. Is this the expected behavior? What are our options in terms of reacting to VoiceOver cursor moving around? What are our options in terms of programmatically moving the VoiceOver cursor to a different element? Here's a sample project that demonstrates the first part of the issue: https://github.com/vendruscolo/apple-rdars/tree/master/DTS12368714%20-%20NSAccessibilityElement%20focus%20tracking If you run the app, a window will show up. It contains a button and a red square. If you enable VoiceOver you'll be able to move the cursor over the red square, and a message will be logged. You'll also notice there's an extra element after the red square. That element is available to VoiceOver, however when it gets focuses, no message gets logged.

Do we need to take approval for any entitlement for the extension Unwanted Communication because currently I do not see my app in the Settings under SMS/Call Reporting extensions.

I have reported this bug on multiple macOS version and it never gets fixed, so I am posting it here in hopes someone at Apple will see this and fix the issue. I use voice control extensively (in fact, it is THE reason I use Macs. I am an amputee, and voice control makes life much easier and there is nothing even close on Windows (or Linux, but Linux is barely usable for people with with two arms)). Voice control has a setting to have a screen overlay numbers, names, or a grid, to help indicate what item you're referring to. There is an option to have no overlay. However, even when overlay is set to None, the numbers overlay still appears on screen, even when I haven't triggered something by voice. If I right click on the desktop, for example, the numbers appear on the menu. This bug has been in macOS for as long as I can remember. I really hope someone at Apple can fix this. There are quite a few other bugs I've reported with Feedback assistant over the years that go unfixed, this is one of the more annoying ones.

We have a requirement to manage the shortcuts and hotkeys in our application, and have it to be intuitive and support multi-lingual fully. The understanding that we have currently is that most universal shortcuts and hotkeys on MacOS/iOS are expressed using English/Latin characters’ – and now, when a ‘pure foreign language physical or virtual keyboard’ is the ‘input device’ – we are unclear how the user would invoke such a hotkey. Now, considering cases where other language keyboards have no Latin characters, in these environments, managing shortcuts and hotkeys becomes a rather difficult task. Taking a very simple example, the shortcut for Printing a page is Command/Control + 'P'. This can be an issue on Non English character keyboards like Arabic, where not only are there no letters for P, there is also no equivalent phonetic character as well, since the language itself does not have it. Also – when we are wanting customizability of a hotkey by the user, how would the user express ‘which is the key combination for a given action they want to perform’. So, based on these conditions, in order to provide the most comprehensive and optimal experience for the user in their own language, what is it that Apple recommend we do here, for Hotkeys/Shortcuts support in Pure Languages

There is an issue with Help Books that started with the release of macOS 14.4. The issue is that when an app attempts to go directly to a Help Book page, the help viewer opens to the Help Book's main index page, rather than the specific page requested. As I investigated the issue I found that the requested page was actually part of help viewer's navigation history, and all I had to do was to click the Back navigation arrow and the requested page would be displayed. So it seems like the requested page is momentarily visited but is then (for whatever reason) quickly replaced by the main index page. Our app uses the AHGotoPage() API for directly accessing our Help Book's pages. This is the same mechanism/code that our app has used for more than a decade and has never caused us any issues. Everything works fine on macOS 14.3.0 and earlier. I've scoured the documentation and can't find any newer APIs for accessing Help pages. I've also tried various other things (e.g. reworking the code, creating new indexes for the app's Help, etc.), but none of it seems to make a difference. As far as I can tell, the issue seems to stem from some change made to the OS. So my questions are: Is this a known bug? And if so, is there any ETA on a fix? Is there something different we should be doing for newer versions of the OS (create indexes differently, use a different API, etc.)?

When my app is in the background, I create a Live Activity through a push notification with token get from pushToStartTokenUpdates, and this process works fine. However, without opening the app, how can I retrieve the new push token for this Live Activity again and use it for subsequent updates to the Live Activity content?

In our application we are using UITableView for data population and that TableView cell contains a button. When we are enabling full keyboard access that time only TableView cell is focusing not the button. We need to focus on cell and button differently.

In our application we are using a Search bar in a pop over view and we have enabled Accessibility full keyboard access and we are using external keyboard. Now if the focus is on Searcher that time by next Tab key press Search bar will dismiss and focus needs to shift to the next UIElement.