Services and sandboxing

Tech Support
1

Following Episode 588 I was inspired to try to write some text services to automate bits of my workflow.

Assume for the sake of argument that I’ve written a text service in Automator called “Speak Text” which accepts text in any application, and has a single “Speak Text” action which speaks the input.

If I now right-click on some selected text in Microsoft Word, I can see the action. I click it. I get two error dialogs almost simultaneously, one saying “The “Speak Text” Service could not be used” and the other “There was a problem with the input to the Service”.

Poking around in the Console I can see what the problem is: Word is trying to read the service workflow file, and the sandbox is blocking it:

Sandbox: Microsoft Word(2590) deny(1) file-read-data /Users/NAME/Library/Services/Speak Text.workflow
Violation:       deny(1) file-read-data /Users/NAME/Library/Services/Speak Text.workflow
Process:         Microsoft Word [2590]
Path:            /Applications/Microsoft Word.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Word
Load Address:    0x10bf8e000
Identifier:      com.microsoft.Word
Version:         16.49.21050901 (16.49)
Code Type:       x86_64 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [1]
Responsible:     /Applications/Microsoft Word.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Word
User ID:         502

Date/Time:       2021-05-20 14:34:14.438 GMT+1
OS Version:      macOS 11.3.1 (20E241)
Report Version:  8

I’ve already given Word full disk access in the security System Preferences pane, but that doesn’t help.

Editing the Word app to remove sandboxing (which if I can do it will presumably work) feels like a bad (and very fragile) approach, but I don’t have any other ideas.

For what it is worth this isn’t just confined to Word: I see the same problem with Preview. But Word is what I want to get working.

Help/thoughts much appreciated!

2

These settings in System Preferences > Accessibility will turn on the feature to speak the selected text on the screen in any application. The default keyboard shortcut is Option+Esc, and that can be changed in the “Options” for “Speak selection”.

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This was the method recommended by Microsoft for Word 2016 and continues to work in the current versions of Word for Mac.

1 Like
3

Thanks! Unfortunately I want to be able to do more than just speak text: I was really using it as a placeholder for a much more complicated text workflow. Hence trying to use Automator and the sandbox problem above.

4

Can you post the Automator code?

1 Like
5

I don’t think you’re alone. The Apple.com discussion forums have a lot of threads with Word/Automator frustrations.

Years ago, under OS X, there were Automator actions packaged with Word and the other Office apps. No more.