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  • victor tsaranvick21@mastodon.social
    Oct 10, 2026, 5:26 AM

    Tired of VoiceOver reading "box drawings light horizontal" over and over in Claude Code, Antigravity, Pi and other TUI apps?

    I made vo-art-squash, a small open-source Mac command-line tool. It adds VoiceOver pronunciation entries that silence the 160 box-drawing and block characters (U+2500–259F) used for frames and borders, in all apps. Easy to undo,
    and it backs up your prefs first.

    github.com/vick08/vo_art_squash

    #VoiceOver #Accessibility #Blind #macOS #A11y
    Tested on Mac 26.x only.

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  • Kaveinthrankaveinthran@mastodon.stickbear.me
    Oct 11, 2026, 6:22 PM

    @patricus @vick21 For NVDA users, you can achieve something similar without installing an add-on. Just add a regular expression to NVDA’s speech dictionary.

    Go to NVDA menu → Preferences → Speech Dictionaries → Default Dictionary → Add.

    Use the following settings:

    Pattern: [\u2500-\u259F]+

    Replacement: Leave empty

    Type: Regular expression

    This should silence the same 160 Unicode box-drawing and block characters targeted by vo-art-squash.

    If you also want to suppress some Powerline symbols commonly used as decorative terminal separators, you can use this expanded pattern instead:

    [\u2500-\u259F\uE0B0-\uE0C8]+

    One caveat: the Default Dictionary applies globally, so these characters will also be silenced outside terminal applications. You can experiment with NVDA’s Temporary Dictionary first.

    This doesn’t address terminal redraws or other accessibility issues, but it offers a simple way to reduce unnecessary speech. I haven’t tested it extensively across synthesizers and applications, so I’d be interested to hear how well it works for others.
    #nvda

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  • victor tsaranvick21@mastodon.social
    Oct 11, 2026, 10:48 PM

    @kaveinthran @patricus Yep, I mentioned just as much in the thread above. THis is why I am not yet sure whether an add-on is a good thing. It may be if I add a few things and configuration options, otherwise, I will look silly submitting an add-on with a one-liner regular expression.
    I think I have ideas though.

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