These are just a few things that I looked up about VoiceOver that I do not want to forget. In order to find them again I figured I might as well post them here!

Speaking Numbers

VoiceOver has a setting to indicate if numbers should be spoken as words or digits. This is a bit hard to find IMHO.

1. Open System Preferences
2. Select Accessibility
3. Select VoiceOver
4. Select the Open VoiceOver Utility button
5. Select Verbosity
6. Navigate to the Text tab
7. Navigate to Numbers
8. Select digits or words

With digits selected, VoiceOver will speak the individual digits of a number. For example, 15 is spoken as, “one five”. With words selected, VoiceOver will speak the word for the number. Thus, 15 is, “fifteen”.

Speaking Large Numbers

I also noticed that for large, unformatted numbers that were inserted via an aria-label attribute, VoiceOver always spoke digits no matter what the System Preference setting. However if I formatted the numbers with commas (for United States locales), the word version of the number was spoken. An aria-label=”2158194″ was spoken as, “two one five eight one nine four.” While aria-label=”2,158,194,” was spoken as, “two million, one hundred fifty eight thousand and one hundred and ninety four”.

I suspect someone listening to this post with VoiceOver might have some difficulty following my explanations since how the examples are spoken will depend upon their system preferences for numbers.