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Getting VoiceOver to shut up

Martin (known as “tempertemper”) describes how to quickly pause VoiceOver’s speech:

• Press the ⌃ (Control) key once to hush VoiceOver immediately
• Press ⌃ again to get VoiceOver to restart reading where it left off

You can also just move to the next bit of content on the page and it’ll start talking again from there.

This is useful to know if you’re just wanting to demonstrate something and talk it through with a colleague – you don’t need to wait for VoiceOver to finish what it’s saying!

You can also do this with the trackpad: “Trackpad Commander also has a gesture to do the same thing: double tap with two fingers”.

Next, Martin walks us through how to mute VoiceOver’s speech permanently, instead relying just on the ‘subtitles’ it overlays on the screen. You could of course mute your sound entirely, but then you wouldn’t be able to listen to music, etc.

Finally, Martin suggests altering the verbosity setting in VoiceOver: “Uncheck ‘Speak instructions for using the item in the VoiceOver cursor’. This turns off the instructions you get immediately after VoiceOver has read you the content, such as “You are currently on a link. To click this link, press Control-Option-Space” when you land on a link.””

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