You certainly said a mouthful about Messages. I've found workarounds,
and the 11.1 update definitely improved things, but not enough to the
point where I'd say it was as usable as it was on Catalina. The way
message conversations are selected for posting new messages or even
deleting the conversation requires more VoiceOver gestures/steps, too,
not to exclude what you wrote which is also absolutely correct.
I haven't tried the Dock stuff yet, but I'm sure it's exactly as you
reported.
One wonders, what were the accessibility testers thinking when it was
pointed out to them during the beta cycle that these things were
different enough such that retraining would be required? I totally had
to retrain myself with Messages, for sure. Unfortunately, I can't go
back to Catalina because I have the M1 Mac, and I took on the challenge
of being an early adopter, so I await improvements which will surely
come. There are a lot of core applications--core for my use anyway--that
are not yet M1-ready, and I agreed to wait for these, but I do like my
M1 Mini for all the core Apple stuff, except Messages,of course, and
probably a few more as I continue to explore Big Sur.
On 12/20/2020 7:25 PM, Mike Arrigo wrote:
I decided to give Big Sur a try on one of my macs, and honestly, I'm thinking
about going back to Catalina. Since I became a Mac user back in 2008, I think
this is the first time that I've considered going back to a previous version of
Mac OS, but for me at least, there are some major issues.
First, whenever I install a major upgrade of the operating system, I prefer to
erase my drive and install from scratch. With the recovery for Big Sur 11.1
this is impossible, Voiceover completely crashes when trying to access the
table of disks in disk utility. So, I had to boot a Catalina recovery to erase
my drive. Once that was done I booted from the Big Sur install drive I made and
the install completed fine.
I think there is a major issue with adding or removing items from the dock.
Previously you could move to an item and then press the up arrow which would
give you the menu for that item. In Big Sur, this works the first time although
when you select the option to remove from dock or keep in dock, that action
does not take place. After that, bringing up the context menu for a dock item
is impossible, pressing up arrow, using vo+shift+m or right clicking the mouse
on the item just returns you to the desktop.
The next issue is with the new messages app, while it's useable, the experience
is cumbersome at best. Voiceover tends to get stuck and you can't navigate left
or right, you have to either use the tab key or use Voiceover's go to beginning
or go to end commands to try to get out of the area that Voiceover is stuck in.
Also, when writing a message, the read current line command does not work. This
is the first time I've really been disappointed with an operating system
upgrade, as I said, more than likely I will be going back to Catalina, I may
play with it for another couple days but if I can't make these things work
better than that's what I'm going to do.
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