getting suggestions to apple accessibility for improving voice over

By Dennis Long, 16 December, 2020

Forum
Accessibility Advocacy

Hi, one thing that would be useful is if Voice over had its own accessibility volume. This would allow voice over volume to be louder than other volume. How would you go about suggesting this?

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Comments

By WellF on Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - 03:53

I'd like to be able to add custom gestures inside activities.

By Duncan Babbage on Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - 03:53

I love it, what a great idea. I think submitting the idea via Apple's Feedback Assistant would be the way to go... I just posed over on this other AppleVis thread info on how to access that for reporting bugs, but the same info applies for submitting suggestions too.

By kool_turk on Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - 03:53

You can already adjust the voiceover volume by adding it to your rotor.

Unless of course, you're refering to something else?

By Duncan Babbage on Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - 03:53

Here's what I found in using this. As kool_turk guides us, you can add Volume to the Rotor in Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Rotor, and then ticking Volume to add it to the options. Once you do that, by selecting Volume from your Rotor and swiping up and down, you can set the VoiceOver volume percent. From what I'm trying, the way this works is in combination with the overall device volume... so a VoiceOver volume percentage of 80% is 80% of the current overall iOS volume—not 80% of the max volume of the iPhone. This VoiceOver volume scale runs from 0–100%. What that means (as far as I can tell) is that you can't set the VoiceOver volume higher than the general system volume here.

What you can do, however, is turn on Audio Ducking under Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Audio. This will lower all other system volume while VoiceOver is speaking, so that you can hear the VoiceOver speech more easily. The specific amount of the ducking is however not configurable by the user.

Well I've learned something useful today. Please feel free to correct me if there's something I've got wrong. VoiceOver is so deep, it's quite a lot to get your head around. :)

(A disclaimer I am getting my head around the beyond-the-basics of Voice Over as just a developer who also makes use of Voice Over myself for convenience at times, but not a primary Voice Over user.)