Notifications interrupting VoiceOver speech

By Luke, 26 October, 2021

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Have you ever been reading an article in the news app or on a website only to have a notification come through and interrupt voiceover halfway through a very long paragraph, forcing you to either start that paragraph over or try to swipe your way back to where you left off? I find this to be a constant annoyance and one for which I think there could be a clean solution: an option in the voiceover settings that basically says suppress any notifications while voiceover is reading an element. Sure, you could turn on do not disturb before delving into that article, but that seems like a nuisance of its own. What do others think? have I overlooked any solutions to this issue that are already available? Thanks

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Comments

By Dawn 👩🏻‍🦯 on Monday, October 25, 2021 - 04:25

I’ve got a possible solution. It’s time consuming, but I think it’s well worth it. It could be time-consuming though, depending on how many apps you have notifications enabled for. What you’re gonna want to do, is go onto your notification settings, and then go through each app, find the ones that you have notifications turned on for, and look at their settings. Turn off the thing that says show as banner. You can turn on or off the notification center and lock screen as you wish. So for example, if you have notifications set up for mail, you would go to Mail, and then depending on its settings, you were double tap into it, and then you would just do select the option for allow as banner.

By Holger Fiallo on Monday, October 25, 2021 - 04:25

The times it happen, 50% VO continues to read where it was interrupted. The rest, I got to read it again.

By Jo Billard on Monday, October 25, 2021 - 04:25

Whenever this happens, I pause Voiceover by doing a two-finger single tap to pause, then repeat to start Voiceover up again. Works like a charm, and takes only a couple of seconds. You can also create a focus that will block notifications from interrupting you.

By Luke on Monday, October 25, 2021 - 04:25

Sounds like maybe some folks have better luck than me because I don’t often find that voice over reliably resumes reading aloud after an interruption. It will either just not continue reading at all, will start from a random place or will read gibberish characters.
I’m going to offer my suggestion to the accessibility folks at Apple because in my view, it’s simple, 100% solves the issue and would remain optional. Imagine a setting that simply said something like, ignore notifications while voiceover is reading an element. When we say element, we are talking about anything from a button, text box, link, heading or large block of continuous text. If you think about it, unless it was an emergency notification, why would you want something to interrupt the paragraph you were reading?