When you mouse over a JButton and a tooltip appears: VoiceOver aborts what it was saying and says something uninformative, like "in system dialog, content is empty, java has new system dialog". (So not only is VoiceOver interrupted: the new text it reads is unhelpful.)

This came up in a recent VPAT review for a desktop application.

That tooltip message is automatically provided in myButton.getAccessibleContext().getAccessibleDescription() , so assistive technologies already have access to the information in the tooltip. (That is: it's important that sighted and non-sighted users get very similar information, and that's not a problem in this case.)

The expected behavior (IMO) is for VoiceOver to not read the tooltips.

This appears to be what I experience in Safari 26.3 when I mouse over the next/back buttons in the toolbar. (There the tooltips are also read as the description / help tag for those buttons.)

Ideally I'd like this ticket to be resolved in a way that allows developers to "turn off" VoiceOver for other windows at their discretion, but the primary complaint here is tooltips.

Sample code:

import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;

/**
 * Test instructions:
 * 1. Open app
 * 2. Turn on VoiceOver
 * 3. Move mouse over each button. Wait for tooltip to appear.
 *
 * Observe every time the tooltip appears, VoiceOver aborts what it was saying
 * and says, "in system dialog, content is empty, java has new system dialog"
 *
 * Expected behavior: VoiceOver should not say anything when tooltips appear. Or if it must speak: it should say something descriptive/helpful.
 */
public class VoiceOverTooltipTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        JFrame f = new JFrame();
        JButton b1 = new JButton("But");
        b1.setToolTipText("But it wasn't my fault, I was given those beans");

        JButton b2 = new JButton("You");
        b2.setToolTipText("You persuaded me to trade away my cow for beans.");

        f.getContentPane().setLayout(new BorderLayout());
        f.getContentPane().add(b1, BorderLayout.NORTH);
        f.getContentPane().add(b2, BorderLayout.SOUTH);
        f.pack();
        f.setVisible(true);
    }
}