This is exactly why I always wait to install new updates until I feel they work out the accessibility kinks. I thought we were there with iOS 14.3 but evidently not. I’m especially frustrated because many in this very forum encouraged me to update it, saying many accessibility bugs were fixed. That may be true, but within minutes of the update I’m already finding one of my most used apps much harder to use.
My news app just went from being a relatively easy to scroll feed of articles organized under headings that could be reached with the rotor headings option to a cluttered mess that I’m having a heck of a time finding my way through. Instead of voiceover just telling me there’s an advertisement, it now seems to be reading me every element of the ad, the graphics, the text, the links, etc. Furthermore, trying to navigate by heading hardly ever works, and many category headings in the feed are no longer actually tagged as headings, meaning I can’t navigate to them. Trying to flick through the feed is a pain. I will touch an article, flick right to move to the one below it and then flick back again only to find that I don’t land on that original article again. At this point I’m having to three fingers scroll up and down and just touch the screen each time in the hopes of finding some thing I’m looking for. Anyone who thinks this is improvement, I don’t know what to tell you. I am hugely disappointed.
By Luke, 15 December, 2020
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Comments
I’m having the same problem…
I’m having the same problem. I normally use Apple news to do research for my tech group on Facebook, but now it’s pretty much useless.
Is your screen recognition off?
Check to see if screen recognition is off in that app by going to the screen recognition in the router. For as wonderful as this feature is, it does tend to mess up some things when it's not needed more often than not.
“Virtually unusable” overstates it for me
Prompted by this post, I took a quick look at the News app for the first time in probably a year.
Yes, the adverts are recognized by VoiceOver as 5 or 6 distinct UI elements, but other than this the list of articles and the articles themselves appear accessible. It's just a matter of a few fast flicks to move through an advert when you encounter one.
Am I missing something that does in fact make things virtually unusable?
Containers
While not a panacea, using container navigation rather than just headings sometimes helps.
I really wish they would do away with the blasted advertisements
I pay for Apple News plus. I think it's a little bit annoying and somewhat presumptuous for them to still spam and bombard me with advertisements. I just want to read the new stories not what everybody else wants to sell me.
advertisements
I'm shocked that you're still getting the adds with Apple Plus. I thought the only reason I was getting them was that I didn't subscribe to the service (which is fair). It sure seems like there are a lot more ads these days though.
--Pete
I've been getting around…
I've been getting around this by clicking the following tab, and then clicking on the news source I want to read. The adds still show up, but aside from that, I've been able to flick through the stories just fine.
Hope this helps.
This is annoying.
I was having success sometimes using headings or containers to navigate, but this is inconsistent at best.
I suppose the upside is I am less inclined to do a long doom scrolling session.
But I am also inclined to find another news app.
Update: minor improvement with one of the suggestions here
Hi,
First, sorry if my original post was a bit melodramatic. You know how it is when you are in the throes of frustration just trying to do something that should be simple.
Anyway, most of my complaints still exist, but turning off some of the automatic recognition features as somebody suggested above seems to have helped at least slightly.
I have communicated these voiceover quirks to the accessibility team so hopefully they will address them soon.
To the person above who questioned the scope of these problems, let me break it out in a more concise and objective manner instead of the original rant format. :)
1. In the news feed, headings such as top stories, for you, politics etc. used to be tagged as headings such that you could quickly navigate them using the headings rotor setting. That is no longer the case.
2. A rotor context menu used to be available in the news feed allowing you to access common actions on articles such as suggest more, suggest less and share. That context menu is now gone, requiring you to go into the article before taking any of those actions.
3. Advertisements in the newsfeed used to be one or two elements but are now literally over a dozen elements, requiring numerous flicks to scroll past them.
4. Focus behavior is inconsistent and sometimes results in the voiceover cursor not returning to where it was before when you flick backward in the feed. This behavior is sporadic. Sometimes it seems to work better than others.
As for the ads, yeah… I was also a paid subscriber to the news app but just canceled that subscription because I frankly don’t find myself reading the magazine articles and other subscription content, and it is ridiculous that you are still bombarded with ads even as a subscriber. That, however, isn’t an accessibility complaint but a general complaint about advertising that many people probably share.
what is it with Twitter feeds within news articles?
I must confess, I don't use the news app like I used to. between Twitter feeds in the news articles when they should not be there: end Myriads of advertisements for things I don't really give a damn about: I just can't find the time to waste my time.
it is really a shame because the app had so much potential when it was created.
Ugh? Those Twitter posts!
@ Eric Davis, yes! That is a serious annoyance for sure and unfortunately isn’t a new problem. For starters, it just seems like lazy journalism LOL. Sometimes that will be the bulk of the article — a Twitter thread. From an accessibility standpoint though, you have to flick through several dozen elements within each Twitter post just to get to the rest of the article. I can understand referencing a tweet here or there if it adds context to the article, but there’s got to be a better and more accessible way to present tweets within articles.