A minor Mac mystery solved

I was baffled not long ago by the behavior of The Washington Post crossword puzzle in Safari: when I typed the first T of the fourteen-letter answer UCANTTOUCHTHIS, CANT disappeared, the puzzle jumped back to the second box, and a screen reader kicked in: “Second box selected.” I was able to reproduce this odd event any number of times.

Doing the Gisnep puzzle last night in Safari, I typed the word DONT and watched it disappear. Over and over.

When I woke up this morning, I figured out what was happening: I have text snippets that replace cant, dont, and so on with can’t, don’t, and so on. Something goes kerflooey when the letters of a snippet enter puzzle boxes. So I unchecked my apostrophe-centric snippets, and now all’s well.

But I’m still wondering why the screen reader kicked in on the WP crossword page — and nowhere else.

Cue theremin.