VoiceOver occasionally skips over initial words in a phrase

I reproduced this issue while reviewing application keyboard shortcuts. As I arrowed up and down through the table, VoiceOver announced "Ms" when it should have said "Cell two items", so it effectively chopped off the first two words, and the first three letters of the third word. Again, VoiceOver announced it correctly after navigating back to re-read.

I thought I was going mad until I read this post that highlighted a similar issue I am having with the DJay app on MacOs.

When scrolling down a list of songs in a playlist, Voiceover will randomly skip over the first few words of the titles.
I believe that these titles are in a table if that helps.

Again, not entirely sure if there's any reason or pattern to when or why this happens, but does seem to be after scrolling down for a while, rarely happens on the first few items in the list.

I think there's a chance you might encounter this bug regardless of the app you're using. I've encountered it with both Finder and MS Word today. It's like one block of text out of every thousand chunks that VO speaks, VO will skip over the initial words or parts of words in that chunk of text.

This is a tough one to reproduce, but I hope Apple takes the time to investigate and eliminate it.

No change with the release of 15.3. It's still an issue.

I had maybe the same or a similar bug in 15.1 where on applevis forums navigating right would skip about 3 paragraphs at once but those would be visible leftward which has been fixed earlier in the 15.3 beta cycle.

I have the same bug on ios

After several hours on 15.4, I haven't encountered it. Let's keep watching.

This is encouraging. I'll be watching this space.

This issue appears to still be present in MacOS 15.4. I also experienced it in iOS 18.4.

Sadly.

If anyone is experiencing this issue in Tahoe beta, please slam Apple with feedback reports. It's a serious productivity killer that shows no sign of going away in Sequoia.

Unless we can find a way to reliably reproduce this every single time, this one might be very difficult to pin down. I'm not experiencing it on my M4 Mini running Tahoe Beta 2. Is there a document I can prepare in something like TextEdit that consistently demonstrates this?

If you're using Tahoe beta on a fulltime basis and never encountering skipped initial words, that's a step in the right direction from Apple.

I finally found time to upgrade to Tahoe 26.5. I hardly had to use the new OS for more than a few hours, before I noticed that this issue is still glaringly present.

IOS26 has held this bug for months, Apple never bothered to fix it!

If the initial word is "whether," VoiceOver might pronounce it "ether," like the chemical solution. This indicates that words and portions of words are being dropped in the text string before it is converted to speech.

This bug is a serious impediment for me, as I am a writer/editor. It's very difficult to know what words are in the text with confidence.

I am running the latest MacOS and I have not encountered such an issue. Can anyone provide instructions to reproduce and what app to use?

I don't experience this issue regularly, and don't think I've ever had individual characters skipped, but I have found that when using VoiceOver's "say all" command on a webpage in Safari with arrow key Quick Nav on, some words at the beginning of a paragraph will occasionally be skipped, in addition to focus sometimes jumping back to other paragraphs, causing their contents to be repeated. Navigating with left and right arrow to navigate the webpage, effectively the same as pressing VO-left and right arrow in this mode, works as expected. I have found no clear way to reproduce this issue.

Some times for me especially on chatgpt but not only there, end of sentences are trunckated. If on safari I do option shift right arrow from middle til the end and then command c magically VO can detect the skipped sections again. Or refreshing the page does the same for VO.
I honestly don't know if this happens on chrome, I just use web apps there.

This problem is super common in IOS26, and it can actually skip the whole phrase or even sentences, especially when it comes to the language switching. For example, I have a text block that has two languages. Sometimes voiceover would say the first letter and then will jump Ride on the text in the second language in the same block. It happens even more often, I would say in most cases if I swipe down with two fingers to try to read everything nonstop. It’s a real bug on iOS, and I believe that we should report it to Apple together. I’ve been experiencing it for at least as long as iOS 26 is here