Voiceover and Safari 6.1 bug?

Hi there

My father uses voiceover and last night I updated OS X Mountain Lion to run Safari 6.1. Now I father is registered blind so uses voiceover. Previously when he has gone to the headings window, all the headings come up and he can move through them quickly. This enables him to navigate around a Web Site quickly.

However since installing the Safari update, not all of the headings are being listed. I would say most are not. On average just 4 might come up as opposed to dozen or more.

Also when he goes to the BBC weather page and it reads out the days, for some of the days it is repeating part of the words. So it's not Wednesday but something like We-Wedn-esday. When going to a Web Site search box, it no longer says "Search text field" but "Search for search. Search text field."

Has anyone else experienced these problems and does anyone know if they are a known bug that has been reported to Apple. I can't believe they are design changes to voiceover and working as Apple intended them to after this update. I'm also surprised the problem wasn't noticed during testing.

My father did try Chrome but he had the same problem. Where as before he did't. Now I only updated Safari and one or two other things but not the Mountain Lion operating system, so why a Safari update have any barring on Chrome. Is Safari more than just a web browser? Do Apple incorporate system wide changes into it?

I even tested this out on my own Macbook Air, which is running also Safari 6.1 and Mountain Lion and I experienced exactly the same issues. I've not tested it yet on my older MacBook which is running Maverick.

I found a couple of links relating to this when searching for the issue using Google but not much else and nothing on Apple's own discussion forums. These are:
http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/msg22432.html
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/macvisionaries/FsE6xcQsgco/eVlefgSKmeIJ

My father can use the links window of the voiceover facility but that includes far more things that he doesn't want compared to headings. For example on a shopping web site a link window might include the price for each item. So if you have 20 CDs on a page, that is 20 prices, along with every other link. Some Web Sites have rather a lot of links on them. Not helpful when searching for CDs.

Now my father don't store much on his computer so we don't back it up, unlike my own computer. I suspect that means we can't revert back from Safari 6.1 without wiping his computer. Not something we are considering. However it they turnout to be design enhancements and working as Apple intended then we will be doing just that.

 

I have further looked into this. What is happening is the following:

When you go to headings, it goes to a heading and instead of reading the complete heading, it is missing out the link part of the text and just reading the text after a link.

For example:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr...emperer&ie=UTF8&qid=1385818134&rnid=382527011

Turn on voice over, go to headings using VO+U. [CTRL+OPTION KEY+U].

You go to the heading listed as By Beethoven and Klemperer (2013) - Import.

What it should be reading is:
"Missa Solemins by Beethoven and Klemperer (@013) - Import"

This that is be design then Apple need their heads read. If it's not by design then they need to fix it sooner rather than later. Hopefully they don't consider bind people to be in the minority and not worth fixing bugs for, assuming it's a bug. I get the impression sometimes that Apple only fix popular bugs. I'm speaking as someone who'd rather use a Mac for most daily tasks than a Windows PC, which is exactly what I do, except at work where it's a Windows environment.

I have now submitted 2 bug reports. Be interesting to see if anyone working for Apple takes any interest in the problem.

 

My father has now found a work around. This involves bring up the headings menu. Then you press esc to close the menu and then you can navigate around using the arrow keys and it reads everything out.

However when reading out Web Sites and you come across links, it reads out both the displayed text and the alternative text where as previously it read out the alternative text or perhaps and I hope not, the alternative text.