Open Radar

 
Summary:
Terminal, or other Terminal-like apps such as MUD clients, don't speak status updates in any mode other than "As it happens" and there's no way to change that with a preference.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start VoiceOver.

2. Open Terminal.

3. Use some means, probably a shell fragment, to update the window regularly, and write sufficiently to cause the next occurrence of whatever is written to interrupt the previous one. This should do:
 while true; do echo -e 'At the end of this announcement, emergency provisions will be made available.\nPlease do not panic.\nWe wish to assure you that nothing can possibly go wrong.';sleep 6.2;done
(works with default rate and Alex, anyway.)

4. Try and arrange for the announcements not to be interrupted by tweaking any parameter with VoiceOver Utility, verbosity settings with VO+V, etc.

Expected Results:
Of course, we'd like the announcement to actually finish (so our brave protagonist gets some emergency rations, presumably). You could also have a mode in which no repetition occurs at all, because no status change is ever announced, or in which a tone is played, or whatever. An ideal situation would be for the messages to simply queue up, one after another, so that new changes are announced as soon as possible, which would be helpful with network conditions on MUDs and in other communications scenarios. In any case, the behaviour should be user-specifiable.

Actual Results:
There's really only one mode of operation, namely that of interruption. Changing the parameters with VoiceOver Utility doesn't do anything at all.

Version:
10.10.3 (14D131)

Notes:
This really is the essential blocker for MUDding on the Mac. It's "Serious" simply because there's no workaround (other than the usual and obvious one of running Windows, of course). I don't know how relevant this problem is to each individual application, but I hope you'll address this problem in the most general way possible, i.e., so that every console app (whether run under Terminal or not) can benefit.