I’m just copy/pasting the contents of an email I sent to the Apple accessibility team a moment ago. If you are also experiencing these problems, I encourage you to do the same. Thanks.
Hi,
I’m experiencing the following new VoiceOver issues on my iPhone SE2 running iOS 14.3. Please let me know if you need further clarification on these. Thanks.
News app markedly more difficult to navigate
Feed categories like “top stories,” “for you,” “politics,” etc. used to be tagged as headings, making them traversable with the rotar but now most of these are not tagged as headings, making them impossible to traverse with the roatr.
Ads in the feed used to appear as a single element, making them relatively easy to flick past. Now they are broken out into numerous elements, requiring many flicks to scroll past.
There used to be a VoiceOver rotar menu available in the main feed page providing rotar access to common actions on articles like suggest more, suggest less and share. These context menus are no longer present, requiring the user to open the article to access these actions.
Scrolling and navigating throughout all areas of the News app seems more sluggish and less responsive overall as of the update.
Mail app
Focus continuously returns to the first message in a thread when viewing a thread of messages and using the “messages” rotar option to flick up and down through the thread. For example, you might flick down through 3 or 4 messages and suddenly find that focus has reset to the first message, making it difficult or impossible to navigate through the entire list of messages in the thread.
Comments
containers
You can try the containers rotor to navigate between news categories.
news app
I've stopped using Apple News since IOS. 11 I believe. I suggest you try Google News. It's got rotor actions and puts categories into headings among other things. I have found no issues navigating it. Only with spicific sources but for the most part, an ad blocker takes care of about 90% of voiceover annoyances. This first issue about having to op, articles to get to actions has been around for a while. One of the many reasons I have now switched to Google News for my staying up-to-date on current affairs. And while I use other news apps, when I want something similar to what i used to get from Apple News I keep coming back to Google News. Sorry I cannot give you a solution to the issues though.
VoiceOver issues introduced in iOS 14.3
The bug with viewing threaded conversations in mail has been present before the introduction of IOS 14.3. I have encountered this behavior for a long time. It's difficult to read a threaded conversation using VoiceOver. Swiping up and down should move between messages in the thread, but this is not the case. A lot of the time I view the conversation from a computer because it gets frustrating when the focus moves to a different message you are not trying to review.
I was sent an E-mail to Apple Accessibility
Hi all, i was sent an e-mail to Accessibility team at Apple with a screen recording regarding to the Mail app that's demonstrate those problems, and they sent me an unser that they go passed to the appropriate team in order to investigate this problems. In Hebrew there is many problems with this update, mostly with Braille Displays.