On-screen text unexpectedly read to me, despite Voiceover (Mac) being disabled On Mavericks, I have Voiceover turned off in both Accessibility settings and Users &amp; Groups.

In the past week, Voiceover has started occasionally reading small bits of text to me, seemingly unrequested.

It seems to primarily be subject lines of new mail in Gmail (running as a webpage in Chrome), but this could be a red herring.

Is there a keyboard shortcut or trackpad gesture that I'm accidentally doing to make this happen? What could be going on?

[Update: see comments - I'm now certain it's only emails that are getting read aloud, but not sure whether it's anything to do with Chrome or not. OS-level email integration?]
Edit:

Read this Apple Discussions article.

I think this is the same problem you are having.


  I think I got it. I was sitting at the screen when a message popped up with the voice over. There was a little spanner icon in the top right which allowed me to turn off this feature.