macOS Golden Gate 27 Beta 1 Megathread

It's downloading over here. I'll keep you all updated for anything I might discover while testing.

Let's see what they've done for us.

There are now shortcuts for ask about immage, ask about current screen, skip back, skip forward and a few more in the voice over shortcuts menu and assignable. None of them seem to do anything though.

In web areas, voice over speaks junk atributes when ever a text block is incountered. This can for example be seen in applevis comments.

For at least three years now I've been waiting to see if apple will finally fix the quick nav bug in Safari.
My hopes are not high sadly.

Well, triggering scripts using the option modifier is completelly broken and causes crashes.

Is VO+Shift+L any different or is it still useless for anything except OCR?

I'm not even going to ask about the navigate by headings bug.

In my limited testing, the image description command now gives you a much more detailed description of an image as long as you haven't enabled the option in VoiceOver Utility under the recognition category to not send images to a server. If you have, it appears to continue using the old behavior where descriptions aren't nearly as detailed. There are also two other commands. VO-Shift-p lets you ask questions about an image by typing them and pressing enter, and VO-Shift-e lets you explore an image and ask questions about it.

No, I am not burned out :) . I simply am not able to update my mac after 4 attempts, a couple of reboots and for once a proper time machine backup.
I get the message Failed to prepare the software update. Please try again. An error occurred while downloading the selected updates. Please check your internet connection and try again.. Of course voiceover for some reason is unable to see anything beyond dialog empty no matter how down I go in the interaction levels so I have to use VOCR.
Any tip? My mac has been plugged all the time.
I'll try over wire as my connection never actually drops.
I'm able to download it actually, I think it crashes after this
Preparing macOS 27 Beta…, About 35 minutes remaining 60% progress indicator
Yeah, same thing again
Failed to prepare the software update. Please try again.
An error occurred while downloading the selected updates. Please check your internet connection and try again.

Either use the softwareupdate CLI tool to grab the full installer (once beta update is enabled in Settings, use the --fetch-full-installer switch), or (much easier and faster) just grab it direct from Apple, here.

Install the package and it drops the installer in your Applications folder just as though you'd got it from the Mac App Store. You can now run the app to install it on the current system volume or a different one (APFS container or a completely different slice, which isn't usually supported by Software Update). You might find it easier to test from a separate volume/partition, anyway, albeit there's nothing quite like trying to use the latest beta with your production data to really see if it's working …

Be careful with beta software, as ever.

I am literally not doing anything critical with my mac nowadays. I have a full backup in any case I am just too lazy to micro manage two partitions.
I didn't even know there was a cli tool for software update but I should have known better as I've read some apple mdm / configurator doc so... Thanks! I'll let you all know if it works or it doesn't.

Thanks, Chris - I'm looking forward to giving that a go. If the server responses are coming from the Apple private cloud thing then I hope this will be something I could use for work images that I prefer not to throw out into the world if I can help it.

Does it still manage OCR OK if you use the cloud option? That's about the only thing VO+Shift+L currently does a good enough job of.

I'm sure I remember a number of MacOs versions ago they added an option where you could select text in an image with the mouse and copy/paste it. (These were the days when my eyes worked a bit) think I only ever got that to work once though, but I always felt I should be able to interact with images in VoiceOver and do something similar.

Anyway this sounds like exactly what I need on my Mac, so this alone has got me excited for the new version. Now I just hope that it's not a horrible buggy mess so I can actually upgrade to it.

Hey everyone, in the first beta version of macOS 27, it’s now possible to record system audio natively. I tested it, and it works really well.

Hi everyone,

I'm considering installing macOS 27 Beta 1 on my primary M4 MacBook Pro, but before I take the plunge I'd be interested in hearing some more general impressions from those of you already running it.

Most of the comments so far have focused on specific issues or features, which is very helpful, but I'm curious about the bigger picture:

- Are there any major VoiceOver showstoppers you've encountered?
- Is anyone else seeing the issue where VoiceOver reads junk attributes in web content, particularly in Safari?
- How are Finder, Settings, Mail, Safari, and general system navigation holding up?
- Does the beta feel stable enough for daily use, assuming you're an experienced beta tester and willing to tolerate the usual rough edges?

I'm not expecting perfection from a first developer beta. A few bugs here and there are part of the experience, and I've been running developer betas for years. What I'm really trying to determine is whether there are any issues that would make me regret installing it before Beta 2 arrives.

So far, the reports seem surprisingly positive, but I'd love to hear more overall impressions from VoiceOver users who have spent some time with it.

Thanks!

Hi,

oh really? what app did you test it with? also can you record both system audio and mic at once? it would be cool if you can.

Cool for system audio, it will make VO bug reporting way easier even if this was a solved problem since day 0 anyway.
It's currently installing on my mac.
As suspected and thank you @Sebby for your input, my bug was just an internet problem. In fact even over wire it didn't work with the system settings update I used the command and opened the installer in /Applications.
I'll report my findings here.
PS: not to be negative, but to say it bluntly, apple really doesn't care about macos accessibility. They can ship non deterministic AI image description but still no native screen recognition on macos to bypass the black magic limitations VOCR has to do? No thank you. I'll believe any serious bug patch when I see one, a real one.

I am really unable to install the update after download even after freeing 80gb of storage. I am too lazy to reinstall the whole thing again though. M2 pro base model 14 inch upgrading from 26.5.1.

It's gotta be an Internet issue, I can't imagine your system is unable to support the beta. 🫤

Hi! I started recording system audio using the Command + Shift + 5 shortcut, but I believe you can also do it via QuickTime. This way, I can record both my voice and the system audio at the same time.

Hi,

In This MacRumors Article, there is a section about accessibility and it says "Easier reading and editing of PDFs using VoiceOver." Did enny one try reading a Pdf Documant on Preview, is there any difference? This is important for me as I read my books in Pdf format on Preview.

Thanks in advance.

As I worried, the new Siri ai app is difficult to navigate. Input window in one place and the output in another. It's very similar to the ChatGPT app and, as far as I can tell, there’s no way to have Siri automatically speak responses to typed queries.

this is completely true. I read the license agreement for the macos beta with Preview and it reads the entire document.

If this doesn't fix it then I'll just create another partition and install it there from scratch.

Nothing ground breaking as expected.
I don't have this bug of extra text being announced on html element on the web like @Soren mentioned, on safari.
They have added the action element to the rotor for no reason while no body was asking it as vo cmd space works to bring up that menu, and there is no way to actually click it as vo space doesn't work.
There is an option under web general or navigation , I suppose it's to pause the announcements of aria dynamic element. What will it do more than live regions which have never worked before anyway? Only apple engineers can know and even that I am not so sure.
Remember that the things like go to next / previous same table level element added in tahoe has
1 no explaination whatsoever
2 doesn't work at all in any meaningful way
Now they have added a thing like go to the next / previous element after the current group or something like that (I am writing this on my windows laptop sorry) and it doesn't work at all voiceover restarts, IE says the welcome message and announce the active window element(s).
They have not done anythigng to vo shift l, added other random shortcuts to describe screen, get more details, describe images, etc. They could have at least done so that when the local option in vo recognition is checked it uses the same vo shift l but a bit more useful with local models but no they are doing to show to the masses that accessibility is important on macos to to avoid further scrutiny from users, in the worse lazy way possible.
Besides that, same buggy mess as usual. No positive change or fix.
The latest bugs with pages @Paul and I brought up are still there.
I haven't tried terminal yet to see if there is any improvement there but I doubt there is anything new.
Some ui bugs that will be fix (for once I am confident) just because it's the first beta.
I opened a simple pdf in preview. Maybe the pdf was actually simple, just bullet list, but nothing ground breaking.
Thing is I had created a new partition to install GG on it with the .app, but the installer was labeled tahoe and it installed tahoe stable even if I used the fetch full installer and the channel was on beta 27 in settings. I was really unable to update with my data so I just went on the new partition, wiped the other and then did through system software update and it worked this time to install gg.
I will do like apple do with us, not care or send no to little bug reports.
No amount of bug report will solve voiceover there at this point but a massive rewrite and more than that of only voiceover.
For the optimistic people out there, get a mac and your vision of apple king of accessibility will change. I'd say that they are still earning their champion of mobile accessibility if, *and only if*, the user is only blind, has no phisical impairment , is able to use explore by touch in most cases, and does not rely on braille as his prymary main output. iOS and its forks on other apple platforms are still very solid for the average user. Their desktop os accessibility will, and in way too many areas already is, sinking under massive technical debt and multi years neglect if no serious work is done soon.
But maybe it's just an emotional response, as I am too intgrated in apple ecosystem to ever sell my mac, and for a developer accessibility aside macos is still very interesting as a relatively posix compliant platform and a refuge against microslop. Maybe I'll end up doing quality reports during free time.