iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 Accessibility: A Summary of VoiceOver and braille issues and improvements

I would call the incorrect labeling of buttons and the weather bug major bugs but that’s just me

I have the Brailliant BI14 and I need to unpair and re-pair each time the screen is locked and unlocked. The braille does not reconnect at all after unlocking, and when I tap on the device in the Braille settings it announces that the Brailliant is not connected.

Here are a few issues I experienced and reported during the beta cycle that haven't been addressed so far.

• Moderate: If you have a phone with an action button and assign it to a control center toggle, such as airplane mode or celular data, VoiceOver won't say anything when you hold down the button to change that setting even though there is a visual banner that pops up showing you what that toggle is now set to. (FB15002458)
• Moderate: A few issues were introduced to the audio graph feature.
  • First, the tones that you hear when VoiceOver plays the graph automatically (using the "play audio graph" action), and the tones you get when manually exploring a graph after a double-tap and hold, no longer match up. The tones you get during manual explorations have far less range and are less precise as a result.
  • There are also 2 issues during automatic audio graph playback. Previously, the sound used to go from left to right to show you progress through the graph, this is no longer the case and the sound is always in the center. Second, if the graph has two data series (a good example is the wind speed graph in the weather app that shows both speed and gusts) you used to get 2 sounds for each series. This is also no longer the case and now only 1 sound is played I filed all of the audio graph issues in one feedback, FB14498874
• Minor: Rate slider has no effect on new Japanese Eloquence voices, FB14060093. I classify this as minor only because you can work around this with the eloquence specific "rate multiplier" parameter.

I can also confirm the lack of labels on the T9 searching feature in the phone app.

I encountered a bug during the beta cycle where users with a Dynamic Island can't access it from the home screen or within a folder. When VoiceOver is enabled, attempting to do so causes VoiceOver to crash and returns the user to the lock screen. I’ve already provided feedback on this issue. Unfortunately, I can't test if this also affects older phone models that only support live activities.

Hello Apple, vis team this is Kaushik from India. I am from Southern part of India where I read Telugu Kannada books, but they have given the voice but the automatic language detection is not happening in VoiceOver. As soon as Kannada or Telugu text comes. This is the issue I’m facing.

VO don't see images in photos app or any other app that has images when swiping left or right, you'll have to use explor by touch to see them and it's not convenient, especially if you're going through a lot of images and what not. Note, this is also happening to videos too. Anyone else having this? I'm on the 13. This has been a thing cense IOS 17.6 or so at least for me.

I have found no reliable way to edit the lock screen with VoiceOver. There appear to be two hidden controls, one for the lock screen, and the other for the home screen, which can only be identified if screen recognition is enabled, but even that method is unreliable. During beta, I opened a feedback issue describing the problem, and apple responded saying it would be addressed in a future release.

What phone are you doing this on? I just made a bunch of edits to my lock screen, including removing my camera and flashlight, as well as adding the Just Press Record wigit thing instead, and had no real issues to speak of. I am using an iPhone 15 pro, and no screen recognition.

I’m glad it works for you.

I reported the issue on an iPhone 15. I wake the phone, hear it authenticate Face ID, then I triple-tap the time display. This opens up a new screen with four mysterious controls. I hear: Page 1 of 2 adjustable, Customize button, Add button, and Show Notifications button. Add button takes me to a screen to add wallpaper, which isn't what I want. Customize button takes me to a screen that mysteriously only contains a Show Notifications button.

If I turn on screen recognition, it’s different, but still not really intuitive. And apparently Apple agrees, as they said they planned to fix this in a future release.

VO is not announcing the keypad numbers on the lock screen with Siri voice 4 on iPhone SE3 running iOS 18.0. Will troubleshoot with other voices and report back. 😣

Issues in the calendar app:
1. Illogical presentation of information. Instead of the event name and the rest, it first provides the travel time. It doesn’t make sense.
2. Furthermore, when we set the travel time in the edit mode, there is no label indicating which time option pertains to travel by car, on foot, or by public transport.
3. Events in the calendar currently do not have labels indicating which calendar they belong to.

I upgraded from the last beta to the 18.0 release, and this is slightly improved. It's still not intuitive, but at least it's reliable.

Triple-tap date or time display, find the Customize button and select it, find the Customize Lock Screen Wallpaper button and select it, four-finger tap at the bottom, then swipe left to find buttons to remove the flashlight and camera.

*Update*

The Alex voice has no problem reading numbers on the lock screen keypad. So, I am guessing it is a Siri voice thing. Hope this helps anyone who, like me, had a mild panic attack when they couldn't unlock their iPhone after the update. 😓

I primarily use the UEB Contracted system table for input and output. iOS 18 added uncontracted and eight-dot tables for English to my listing of braille tables I use. I could remove the eight-dot one by using the Delete option in the Actions rotor, but I couldn't remove the uncontracted table using the same method. I really hope that this is a bug and Apple not deciding that all users need to have the uncontracted table available—as UEB creates no ambiguity with either forward or back translation, there should be no need to have it available if a user is comfortable using contracted braille.

Workaround: Remove the contracted braille table, then go into the screen for the uncontracted table and set it to contracted.

As the subject line suggests, I'm finding with BSI that dot 6 isn't being registered the majority of times I attempt to use it. I've recalibrated my finger positions several times, but it seems to me that the region of the screen where it will be registered is quite small.

Thanks for posting what you did and preventing my panic attack. I have one of the Siri voices set, along with a few others, but think I'll avoid that for the time being and stick with either Eloquence or Zoe for now! Hope you've recovered, Lol.

It's so odd to me how I can have an experience that is so diffirent from others on the exact same phone moddle as me.

The amount of bugs in this new release of IOS is concerning.

Sadly, it's not concerning enough for me to go and work for apple, I don't like them enough for that, but it's still something I think about when reading posts like this.

Some bugs will get squoshed over the coming months but they really should have a team of actual disabled people who get paid good money to go over this stuff.

When I first updated to iOS 18, my Siri voice indeed didn't read numbers. But after a few minutes, the voice itself got updated, and now it reads numbers normally. I can enter my passcode and phone numbers without any problems.

Brad even if they had a team of testers that were disabled and we don't know they don't it is imposible to catch every bug. Everyone has different apps different configurations ETC. there is just no way you will catch everything or even close to everything.

I am using IPhone 14pro with English singapore Siri

When I ask it to open an app, say, "open pocket cast", it will subsequently say "which app?" then, if I just let it be, it will open the app after that. Previously, it just opens the mentioned app without asking which app. i have tested multiple times by turning off wifi and connecting to mobile data, but it still occurs for me.
Did anyone have the same issue?
thanks

When composing an email in Apple Mail on iPhone 15 Pro Max with the released version of iOS 18, if I type the first few letter of a contact and then choose it from the Auto complete list after the contact is inserted to the two line. The focus suddenly jumps to The message body text. I then need to double tap the To line again to insert another contact and yet after the contact is inserted from the Auto complete list the focus jumps to the message body yet again. Not the end of the world, but super annoying.

At least for me I encountored that while using the volumen control in the rotor, nothing happens and the voice keeps in the same volumen, so I have to go to voiceover-voices-current voice to change it.

Hello,
honestly, it's really disappointing that there are so many bugs related to button labeling in this release.

I can perfectly understand when a bug is difficult to catch, can't always be reproduced, etc... But button labeling falls under accessibility basics, and Apple should be setting an example for other developers wanting to make their app accessible. To me, this is a real failure, and I hope it stops happening. It's really annoying that I can't use the new T9 dialing feature only because someone didn't add a VoiceOver label tu a button. To be clear, it is not entirely unusable, the phone number edit box updates to tell you who you're calling when you activate the button, but it's much less efficient.

On the other hand, they deserve praises for the fact there are no major bugs this year.

Has anyone noticed that while typing on a normal IOS Soft-keyboard, VO now announces each letter in a very slow speech-rate, regardless of what speech you've set for your voiceover speech.
It's not a deal-breaker, but a bit annoying.

Hit a huge issue in the control center. After adding a control the whole thing has stopped responding. No amount of shutting VO off and on helps, nor exiting and re-entering the control center is bringingX back. I can move around the upper items (wifi, power button, etc) but can't interact with anything.

Hopefully restarting my phone will help. I use the control center constantly.

I am loving having typing sounds in BSI though, no lie. Would put up with any issues for how good this is. And I can type "for" again, finally!

Edit: Restarting solved this one, phew!

@Brooke,

You are welcome. That was one of the most interesting iOS experiences I have had this week (see: Terrifying).

@ David Lai,

Hmm, I did not even think to reinstall my preferred Siri voice. I did find that other Siri voices read numbers just fine, those downloaded post update, that is. Will have to try redownloading Siri Voice 4 (US) and cross some fingers.

...and maybe a toe or 3. 😇

So I'm a little bit confused about the issue some people are facing. some people say that when they updated their devices were silent when using Siri voices, like it wouldn't read out numbers or when entering your passcode on first boot? Does this just affect the siri voices or other voices affected too.

This reminds me of iOS 13, when speech literally wouldn't work for like a day after the installation. That was at least in my experience, not sure if other people had that issue, but it was happening on an iPhone SE and an iPhone 7. Pretty sure it got resolved after awhile, but it was scary.

So, my experience was as follows. I had my iPhone SE3 plugged in, and updated to iOS 18. Once I got passed the usual screens we have to endure after every major update, I was on my lock screen. Normally pressing the Home button, or double tapping the 'Click to open' message at the bottom will pull up the keypad for typing in your passcode.

I have used Siri voice 4 (US) for a little while now, and that is the voice that was set in this instance.

The issue was when I attempted to type numbers, it was making the sound effect like VO does when typing on a keyboard with the voice itself muted.

And yes, I tried the 3 finger double tap to check if I did in fact mute the voice.

I had not.

For whatever reason the US Siri voices within VO are not reading numbers properly. There is a possibility that reinstalling said voices will fix this.

We shall see.

HTH.

I don't use US voices, as long as they don't affect Australian voices I'm fine. But hopefully the issue gets resolved from people who used those voices. Can anybody confirm that that issue doesn't affect non-Siri voices? Thank you.

Australian English and UK English Siri voices worked fine for me. 👍

I've created several activities that change VO's voice when I open certain apps. This no longer works in iOS 18. I even deleted and recreated the activity but no luck. Is this broken or has something changed?

I'm not sure when this functionality stopped working, but my Braille Screen Input no longer expands my text replacement shortcuts set in the keyboard preferences. Does anyone have a way of turning this on again? I find it's an excellent way to type emoji from BSI.

Both my activity that changes VO's voice and the ability to use text replacements with BSI are completely unaltered in iOS 18.

Thanks for the heads-up about text replacement. I seem to have fixed it now, and it might or might not have something to do with multilingual keyboards - what I did was:

• Make sure the multilingual keyboard is set up properly including the needed iCloud download in general>keyboard

• Made sure my text replacements carried over in the keyboard settings

• Reboot iPhone

Just got the security update with IOS 17.7 as of today. Will check tomorrow if IOS 18 is available. I am from India. I am still haunted by many bugs which I am reluctant to report here as I have already escalated to apple and I have not received any reverts

Control is not working with VO. Added magnifier and everything well until I finished, could not move around the other apps, VO stop working, needed to restart phone to make it work and did checked to see if magnifier was added. It was. Bug.

Is this using a Siri voice? I had a similar thing happen with MacOs Sonoma where the Siri voice became unbearably slow to read letters, to the point where I was no longer able to use it. Could try swapping it out if so.

The Living Blindfully podcast did a very detailed breakdown of iOS 18 new features and it looked like there was an option on the Siri voices for VoiceOver where you could change between the normal mode with all its inflections and a fast mode that seemed more appropriate for a screen reader. It's possible it was 18.1 but you could also try looking for that.

Sorry I'm not quite brave enough for iOS 18 yet. I was tempted but the posts above have put me off.

So I just tried out iOS 18 on my spare iPhone 12, and...the mentioned bug regarding the control center doesn't seem to be true. I was able to use VO's rotor to rearrange control center items.
Also, from my observation, it seems that all buttons in the photos app are properly labeled by VO.
The bug where VO announcing of "off" on custom controls, such as opening an app, is true though, as well as the inability to use VO's rotor to move home screen icons to a non-linear position. There is also indeed no way to close out of the choose app screen in the lock screen customization screen without using the 2-finger scrub gesture.
Also, from my tests with a test podcast file, VO's volume seems to behave normally when the "when speaking" is selected in the audio ducking option.
The VO's announcement of "Collapsed Stack" seems to be true, though I can't really reproduce this constantly on my spare iPhone 12 since that phone is not linked with my Apple ID, and the spare phone doesn't have any third-party apps installed where I can reliably reproduce this bug.
So all in all, I think I'm going to go ahead and upgrade my iPhone 15 ProMax and see how it goes. But so far based on my tests using my spare iPhone 12 things are looking positive.
Edit: The bug where the buttons for creating a widget from a home screen icon seems to be true. There is one button with a pretty weird VO label followed by "small", "medium" and "L" which I assume is for large.

I do not get this on my notifications. I did go into the notification settings and insured. I had my option set to list. Not sure if that did anything, but again I do not get the “collapsed stack“ message when listening to notifications on my lock screen.

iPhone SE3 running iOS 18.0.

Has been there for me since I think public beta 3. So long in fact I've got used to it. Oh and yes set to list in settings. iPhone15 pro.

Hi all ,
I read all the posts and found that no one has mentioned the bug I encountered yet.If you are using Simplified Chinese, you will encounter a serious bug in iOS18.When you navigate most pages using "Character" in the rotor, VoiceOver won't read out the explanation for each character.Maybe you don't use simplified Chinese and may not understand what I'm saying. For example, when browsing English content, if you select the character rotor, VoiceOver can match each letter with a word as an explanation. For example, if you browse to the letter "g", VoiceOver may say "G, Good".There is a similar function in the simplified Chinese interface, but the reading method is different. Now this function is almost broken.Why do I say almost broken? Because it works as expected in very few pages, such as the home screen view or the settings app, but this feature is not available in most Apple-developed apps or third-party apps.This function is a very frequently used function by Simplified Chinese users. If it is damaged, it will greatly affect the daily use of users. Therefore, I suggest that if you use Simplified Chinese, please do not update iOS18.0 for the time being.

Perhaps is not for you but for some of us it is. 13 pro.

Now they don't, not even when I double tap on the notification. If this is behaving like stacked notifications, how do I get them to work?

When you have more than 1 notification certainly for me anyway flick right past the first one that will speak and there is a button to show notifications. Double tap and it expands thhem all like it would as a list.

Well this is weird.
today i tried to get spotlight but wen I do the three finger gesture to invoque it, nothing happens, voiceover only says Spotlight, but nothing appears. What is more weird is that inmediatly I tried to open my settings to see if there was something missing about it and just then was when the spotlight searching box appeared as well as the keyboard to type there.
I repeated this action with other apps and it was the same. It seams that to openthe spotlight, i have to do the three fingers gesture and then click on any app to open the searching box (it doesn't happen with folders).

Hi there, does anyone know where to find the mic modes for facetime/phone calls? I looked in control center, but I cannot sceme to find it anywhere.

Whenever my face ID doesn't work, I've used Braille screen input to type in my passcode, but now it doesn't come up. I took Braille screen input out of the rotor because I set it up to turn on automatically, and having both seemed redundant, and a little confusing. Is this a bug, or am I not doing something right?

Hi, I am unable to use the new gesture to type to Siri. How would one go about activating this gesture?

All you need to do is double-tap with 2 fingers. You need to put 1 finger at each edge of the screen to enter Braille Screen Input mode. Then you can just Braille your password like you normally would.

To find the mic modes you need to be in a face time call or a phone call. Go into the control centre and find the services in use icon. Double-tap on it and you will see the different mic modes.