Apple Releases Software Updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and HomePod

Talk back 13.1 just got spell check
USB braille support via USB. actions have also been added and I believe other changes. Android 14 looks good.

This seems to fix a VoiceOver related crash in the Apple Music app which I've been experiencing lately when swiping or scrolling in the "listen now" tab.
@Dennis what's your complaint here? The features you're highlighting have been on iOS for years, except possibly for USB braille support. Talkback is getting good, but I'm not sure what your point is.

My point is there are focus issues and other issues that Apple seems to be ignoring. You can't just rest on being the best for accessibility if they take this approach android could catch up in a few years and people may have options.

First of all, let me start by saying that I hate vocalizer voices with utterly passion. However, there is lack of yt the voice like Alex in the other accents of English so I had to use them. There are a lot of problems that Apple hasn't fixed.

One, the weird inflection. The vocalizer voices has really weird and unnecessary inclemency, which renders them unusable. The other problem with inflection is sometimes the pitch of the voice deviates itself by going too high or too low.

The second problem is the smoothness. I can give you a challenge guys, but besides, the Siri voices, no other voice can achieve the smoothness of user experience, then Alex Ken. It has every single flawlessness that makes voiceover utilization perfect. no matter it comes to volume, or the way Alex pronounces things, it is perfectly done by Apple.

and the last one, which is the most important one is the date format. Alex is able to differentiate between 5 January, and January 5. You can try by yourself by choosing Alex on your Apple device, and reading this post. It is a clearly stupid mistake that vocalizer voices makes, because English is a universal language. Every other countries will have different dates and formats, and our text to speech is, should be able to read all of them without any mistakes. I really agree with Dennis, android is getting better which is I'm happy by the way, but it makes our iPhones less usable updates buy updates.

For some strange reason when I go out, after I come home, find my app keeps telling me that my AirPod pro were left behind. Not. they are with me yet I get the message every time. Nuts.

This is the bug where if you go into notification center with chord dots 46, the braille display gets stuck along the beginning of notifications, usually either at notification center, or the time, and you can't move anywhere to read the notifications, unless one forces it by touching along the phone screen to change the focus, then you can move about or leave notifications.

I should say that I'm referring to the latest update for iOS, and I'm using the NLS eReader and encountering this bug, so not sure if it's affecting all braille displays.

roman that is my point. It seems braille bugs are happening more and more on iOS other bugs are getting unfixed. At what point do we as consumers say enough is enough hopefully if android keeps coming along we will have that option for all to choose not only on price but both platforms will be equally accessible if you want to use a keyboard braille display or the touch screen. You hopefully won't need to pay $1500 for the top of the line phone because apple in a few years comes out with a Ultra phone and it starts at $1500 or $2000 and all the best features are there.

I agree. More options would bee better.

I feel really sorry for the Braille users who are experiencing bugs more then ever before.

I had my sighted spouse look over my shoulder as I updated to the latest Mac OS. Here are our observations.

Item one, multiple progress bars move from 0 to 100%, at least a half dozen times, none with VoiceOver feedback. I would think the sheer number of progress bars would be considered a bug for sighted users.

Finally, I get a login prompt and enter my password. This works as expected.

Issue two. After entering my password, I get another progress bar. This one takes considerably longer than the previous progress bars. While it is in progress, attempts to navigate, interact, or stop interacting all generate the VoiceOver message "Installer progress has no windows". However, my sighted spouse tells me there is text just below the progress bar. I had her move the mouse to that text, which allowed me to press VO+F5. Then, VoiceOver announced, "About seven minutes remaining, is under the mouse." So there is a window, and there is text on the screen. But VoiceOver says there is no window and leaves me with no effective way to read its text.

Issue three. There is a known Mac OS Ventura bug in which background tasks are unnecessarily announced in the notification area. With VoiceOver enabled, the announcement of this unnecessary notification occurs just as the installer is prompting for the Apple ID password. Consequently, VoiceOver users are not informed that the system is prompting for an Apple ID password. My sighted spouse had to tell me.

And I believe this is also a bug, but if there is one window open and a notification pops up, then VoiceOver focus is in the notification area and Command+Tab will not take you to the only open window. You must use VO+F1 or VO+F2 to switch to that window.

Conclusion: Another inaccessible install. Hopefully discussing it here will raise awareness.

The installer progress windows have been broken with VoiceOver for years. The last time I remember it working well was in Snow Leopard. Everything read beautifully back in the good days of VoiceOver.

Hey. I haven't noticed these kind of details, because I was installing macOS and I was thinking that all this is how it's supposed to be. Well, Apple should fix the problems which I've mentioned above and a lot of people have mentioned on this post.

I'm not a braille user but here are my thoughts. You got to wonder how many of the beta testers actually use braille, either that or there are not enough voiceover braille users for apple to actually care about fixing the braille bugs.

Wouldn't say there are no fixes for VoiceOver. While Eloquence pronunciations still have not been updated, the very annoying clicking on the letter "o" and such, as heard with the Reed and Eddie voices, has disappeared from iOS. Very welcome change I have been waiting on for months!

There are a lot of braille bugs yes, now, but I'm just glad we're not stuck with braille display crashing alot when there are flash messages with VO. I think this current bugs is a something we can deal with until they get fixed, yes they're driving me crazy, but yes also I'm sure they're working on it over there at Apple Accessibility. Peace out over there!

Just because they introduced spellcheck and things doesn't mean its working well. Example spellcheck only seems to work in messages for me and not in the browser or teligram or other apps. Every OS has bugs the way I see it is Android is just copying what Apple has done they aren't inovating at all. I think we should have choice and if your a speech user I think you do at this point. However to say Android is free of bugs either is just hogwash.

Well we have another problem with vocalizer voices and some times with Alex.

So whenever Alex or vocalizer is reading Long text, voiceover, resets, and it says "screen curtain on "

Then I have to start all over again to read whatever I was reading. And sometimes if I use voice over in a normal situation (to navigate my phone) it says the same thing.

In vocalizer, though, i t happens frequently. But with Alex or eloquence, it happens more or less.

I said it was making progress and if Apple continued to ignore bugs and not fix them we the users would have choice I think you need to read again what I said.

You say you can only use Android spell check in area such as messages which is true. However have you forgotten how limited it was when it first came to Apple? For a refresher listen to the podcast Scott davert did on it.

Yo guys.
Just combine
the overall BSI bug of cursor loosing its innitial position introduced in ios16
+when voiceover randomly loose focus within an app and the cursor go elswhere and even clik on items
You get a mess!
There is another bug no one complain about
what is happening with the vocalizer voices!
since ios 15 or so, especially french voices, whichever you choose you will notice a big lack of overall quality and bounch of pronontiation bugs, inflexion errors, ameli fr-canada is unusable, and for every voices be it compact or hq.
moreover, idk for english voices. but take the siri female 1 french fr voice, listen the sample. then put that voice with voiceover. it's not at all the same voice, it's so slow, tons of bug, it's worst than any poorly made compact voice you'll ever hear... and we have since ios... ... ios, 12!!! and nobody complain about it!
who is faulty here, apple or the users?! I honestly think the mistake is from both sides.
another bug, voiceover tends to randomly analyze and do ocr on screen element in an app where the interface is already accessible. it happen generally on messages app such as whatsapp, messenger, where it analyzes profile picture and give a poor but especially unwanted description of the profile when yet we are just on a message and are reading it. I tried to disable this feature completely but doesn't work.
all these bugs, and many other that I either forgot or didn't mention, are being present since a while, included in ios16.3.1. and I haven't seen anything about them on applevis or other accessibility related websites.

No, the image descriptions aren't a bug, that's part of voiceover recognition. If on, whenever you come across any image, voiceover will describe it. Its not a bug in this case. If you go into accessibility, voiceover, voiceover recognition and read the description next to the on and off switch of image descriptions, it says the following,
Your iPhone will speak descriptions of images in apps and on the web.
This isn't a bug. Ferthermore, if you want to turn this off, just turn off image descriptions if you don't like it, however, I wanted to make that clear. Its not a bug.
Regarding mac OS installer window beeing broken, from testing, I wouldn't say its broken, per say. There seem to be to fazes, when it restarts for the first time, that's when you get the, installer has no windows, but once it restarts for the second time, you'll get the progress, per my testing at least when upgrading. Also, I believe this only happens when major updates come out. When its a miner update, the computer only restarts once, however if you just wait, you'll eventually be taken to the password screen. I updated to the latest ventura version without a hitch yesterday.
I agree though, all software has bugs, android, windows, ios, mac... Seriously there isn't a software without bugs, its not just a apple thing. Windows and android have had long standing bugs which still to date haven't been fixed i'm sure, so please, don't just say, oh its just apple, because its not. I'm not saying that this is ok, for the record, i'm just saying that it isn't just apple. Ferthermore, what we should do as always... If you find a bug... keep reporting. Just complaining won't get us nowhere, reporting bugs will. It might take time but atleast we're trying and letting apple know of the encountered bugs.
As far as vocalizer voices? That isn't apple's fault. Apple is just upgrading to the latest version of vocalizer voices, but apple aren't the ones who own, or make, or update the voices... That's the company who owns vocalizer voices whom you should be reporting said problems to, not apple. That's the equivalent of downloading a app from a third party developer onto the mac. When the app turns out to be inn-accessible, you saying, oh its apple's fault... Um... no. This is on the third party developer that the app isn't accessible, not on apple, as apple doesn't own the app to insure it's accessibility.

joe, Dennis never said android or IOS was bug free. I like both android and IOS personally. I have both an android samsung galaxy a14 and an iPhone 13 mini, iPad 8th gen and iPhone SE 2020.

I think what will eventually happen is that Android will become viable enough to be used by braille users. However, I think we're quite some distance from that time yet. Why? Well, we finally have built in support for braille displays, which is good, but it tookd them 13 full release versions to get this far. How many more years do we have to wait? iOS was on version 4, I believe, when braille support was introduced. It may have been 3, I had much better braille support under iOS 4 than Android 13. that was 12 years ago. All that said, I hope they have it working well enough by 14 and that I can finally seriously consider making this Pixel 7 my daily driver. If I were one of those cool people who could hear well, I'd probably already be on my way out the door.

currently android has to get better keyboard support. also here is a link. contact them with the improvements you want to see so they will improve.

https://support.google.com/accessibility/answer/7641084?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid

I like how android has their version of the rotor, you can go by links and stuff now. espeak has greatly improved with voices like Glenn, Betty and other voices, its a nice experience.

While there may not be a large number of braille users, some of us are doing the best we can to test. When I was Beta testing for iOS 16, I tested with all three displays I have access to. These were the NLS Humanware device, Braille Note Touch Plus, and the Actilino. I now have a BrailleSense u2 which does not have the enter key problems that other displays are having. This was fixed briefly but then returned in another Beta. I suggest anyone else with an NLS device from either manufacturer report bugs, as it's the least you can do with a display which costs you nothing, assuming you have the braille proficiency to work with it of course.

They should make software updates every second year at least, and not every year. That should give them time to iron out bugs. Oh well.

I'm not the best at BSI but I still use it a lot on the go, and so involves a lot of deleting. Doublefinger swipe to the left, to delete full words or what VO classifies as words, works for a little while, I have a habit of rapidly deleting, and so before I know it, VO has said "Stopping Braille Screen Input" and I've totally messed myself up. Argh! Apple, if you're looking at this, (I am not in any way people trying to say you don't care, but...) please pay a bit more attention to this particular bug.

There are users here that I've seen say they're from Apple, so yeah.

The notification issue which announced the following,
login items, application has added items that can run in the background. You can mannage thhis in settings,
appears to be fixed per testing. Previously, whenever I launched vmware fusion, weather once per day, or 10, I'd get the, login items added, notification, every single time. This is no longer the case. This seems to be fixed, thank god.