Avoid an OS X text-to-speech bug that affects Moom

In “OS X El Capitan and tvOS still a bag of hurt for people with motion sickness and other vestibular disorders”, Craig Grannell mentions an odd bug he discovered that affects Moom and other window management apps:

I also recently discovered an issue with window manager Moom, where windows wouldn’t snap, but would instead skid around the display, triggering motion sickness. It turns out other window managers are affected, and the trigger is activating text-to-speech.

Basically, if you use text-to-speech and then use Moom within the same app, you’ll find that Moom behaves in strange and ugly ways: windows slowly wander to their new positions, and you can’t resize and move (i.e. use the grid), as only one of the two operations will complete.

The issue, unfortunately, lies in OS X not Moom, so it’s not something we can fix. There are two workarounds, though:

  • Use text-to-speech via the menus, instead of the built-in hot key. Use Edit > Speech > Start Speaking to start, and Edit > Speech > Stop Speaking to stop. When invoked via the menus, the bug mysteriously vanishes.

    To make this easier to do, you can assign global keyboard shortcuts for Start Speaking and Stop Speaking in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts:

    The defined keys should work in any app that supports text-to-speech.

  • If you quit and relaunch the app in which you used text-to-speech, Moom will return to normal, at least until you again use text-to-speech.

We’ve reported this bug to Apple, so hopefully it’ll be fixed in a future OS X update. Until then, though, if you use Moom (or another window manager) and text-to-speech, you’ll have to rely on one of these workarounds.

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