The Accessibility Bugs Introduced and Resolved in iOS 16 for Blind and Low Vision Users

So this has been an issue I've had for a while, but when in a call (using Oticon OPN s1 hearing aids and BrailleNote Touch+), the mic mode for standard, wide spectrum, and voice isolation can never be changed. Does this have to do with the bluetooth problems that seem to exist with the BrailleNote, which likes to hogreconnect even when it's connected?

Upgraded on 10S and nearly all native iOS voices are gone, including all advanced options and ability to use SIRI voices as regular voiceover options. This is infuriating beyond words.

I had that issue until I rebooted my device.

Was this in reference to my issue with voices?

Press space+Dots2-8 every time just before you do a new line.

And for the no speech after reboot bug, could you just use touch/face ID?

I thought the issue with focus jumping to the top of the screen couldn't get worse but I seem to have been wrong there. Not only is this still happening whenever a link is clicked on a page and opened in a new tab, now it will just happen at random. So far I've been in the process of actively reading something when the cursor jumps back to the top of the page for no reason I can detect. Seriously how is this not a big problem for anyone else?

Yep!

I go to Messages > Stickers, and go to the bottom to change my avatar. But it just go to Expand button, and this is closer to the top and I have to scroll through all my stickers to get to Avatars. Of course, I have to pass "New Memoji" button on the way there, but VO don't give any indication it's there, I can just swipe through stickers and straight to avatars.
I try clicking on one, and it doesn't do anything. I swipe in and out of the Avatar section, try clicking on it again and the whole darned thing crashes and I have to reopen it and do all of that scrolling again. Also, I might have to do alot of swiping forward and back because some random ones are skipped.
I still have to go to Avatars then swipe back to get to "New Memoji" but if I accidentally skip it (which, trust me I will and have done), I can't swipe back to Avatars. The only thing that gets them back is close stickers and reopen it.
Then when I open expand there's usually a More Options button at the top, which you can use to access options like New Memoji, Edit, Delete, etc, but it's not there.
Has anyone experienced these issues?

For me atleast, elequence is sounding great. I'm using reed, US, not reed UK, the UK version of elequence is horrible, imo. I get that this is highly subjective though so yeah. But for me at-least, I'm Liking elequence.

After the upgrade, the VoiceOver voice was reset to the default for the configured language/region. This did not happen immediately. After the first boot, the voice that I had configured was used, but when unlocking the device later, I noticed it had reverted to the default voice for the language and region.

This was easily fixed in VoiceOver settings.

I'm wondering with those of us who have or are currently experienceing the no speach after reboot are using Samantha? I switched to a different voice other than samantha until the ios16 install was complete on my SE3 and didn't have the problem on reboot like I did on my 8 when using Samantha.

The passcode has to be entered right after the phone restarts. That's where the problem happens. Yeah, if iOS allowed for either face or touch ID to work at that point, it would be all good.

While this bug was off and on it seems to be very frequent in ios16. When you hang up from a call and this includes aira, voiceover will go silent and only make the clicking sounds. I just lock and unlock my phone again and it comes back. A friend and I both had this issue. She has an SE2 and I have an SE3.

Sorry, wrong forum topic. LOL.

And iTunes cannot connect to the server... Every time I press update, either it does not do anything or it says Contacting Apple server or something, then it comes back to update. Not even a restore, it comes back the same. When it gets passed this, it says extracting software then it says the iPhone could not be found.

The iOS Twitter app is totally broken with 16. Can’t scroll, access the menu bar or anything. Can someone let Twitter a11y know so they can fix?

Of course, I have reported them to Apple's accessibility. If you can reproduce, please report to Apple.
1. With notification summary turned on, only app names are pronounced, and Voiceover does not announce notifications themselves. It happens on the lock screen, as well as in the notification center.
2. Choosing a voice for an activity overrides the Voiceover setting for recognizing different languages. It is an old problem, at least from iOS 15.
3. There is no way in activity settings to return to the “default” global system user’s speech profile. deleting the chosen voice only removes its data from the device and Samantha takes its place, but no language recognition is done. Choosing the default voice takes Samantha's place but does not recognize languages either. There is no control allowing the default. The chosen voice still is shown to the one before Samantha. Choosing voice of a Cyrillic language does not much good, because none of them is reading well English or other languages. The only option is to delete the action and set it up from the very start which is not a good option if it holds many changes. Is seems that the settings for different voices in an action is not possible. Both voices speak
with the same speed for example. It surely is a problem for a people who learn a new language.
4. It is impossible to rename an activity from the keyboard or by dictating. Entering the first letter, the keyboard hides itself and the focus is somewhere on the activity options screen. Dictating does not help neither. After dictation there is no way to confirm the new name. Pressing enter does no good;
pressing the back button or with z-scrubbing VO gesture goes back without saving the changes. I don't see a "done" button anywhere.
Problems 2 and 3 are very serious for multilingual users
Here is the link to the demo video:

https://1drv.ms/v/s!AoV-jzT5_MuTi5xZp-0Y0KqFFoLNUA?e=LTcESK

Whinston Chen tweeted that if you use iOS voices in VoiceDreem reader app, better do not update to v16.

Has anyone else had issues with Siri voices? Only American female voice is available. My phone is also running very slowly, typing this for example, I need to press keys maybe 1 second apart on Bluetooth keyboard so it can keep up. I’ve tried resetting, re-installing voices so far. Premium voices aren’t even available. It’s just low quality versions. Very frustrating, it happened first thing this morning while my phone was locked. Anyone else found a way to get them back? Thanks.

This might be a little unrelated, but because it's what I'm updating to ipados 15.7 to wait for IPADOS 16. So what's it like? Any big bugs? Is it the same as ios 16?

as the title said. some of the voice over voices are a little bit sluggish like the english UK stephonny and also the cantonese Sin Ji

Hi, I have noted two bugs after updating to iOS16 on my iPhone 13::

1. Direct touch for apps such as Blindfold Games is broken. Focus is lost within the direct touch area of the app in question. Further, if you then go to settings, none of the buttons work. The only way to get things back to normal is to restart your phone.

2. If you ask siri what song is playing, she won't tell you. The work around is to use the music recognition feature found in control centre.

@Rob and all, I can duplicate this. In fact, it started with iOS 16 betas but managed to find its way into the final 16.0 release. If I ask Siri to recognize music, it says that it can't do that and that I can try in a little why. As Rob mentioned, the work-around, which is rather uncomfortable and a bit time-consuming, would be to use the Music Recognition button in the Control Center.

I found a bug when using live captions and a braille display. Once captions is on, go into any text field and start typing it types all kinds of odd symbols rather then words. Changing the input or output does nothing and the only way to fix is to turn VoiceOver off and on again. Is anyone else seeing this?

As a lover of the Eloquence Reed voice, I can confirm that it is a miserable fail on the iPhone. The voice is exceedingly muffled and I am forced to drop my normal speed of 85% all the way down to 60% for him to be understood. Something when wrong, when transfering this one from a Windows platform over to the Apple platform. On Windows, Reed is clear, clean, and not choppy. I use it at a high rate of speed and don't get listening fatigue. Of course, I realize that all voices are subjective and all have their own particular preferences. It just confounds me how something so seemingly simple can be messed up so easily.

And since I'm on the topic of voices... I am disgusted with Apple for even adding the novelty voices on to my device. They are a waste of time, not productive, and I couldn't imagine anyone actually using them in their daily workflow. I have written of my experiences using the Gester voice on another thread here. suffice it to say, I was forced to ask for sighted assistance to turn off the Gester voice. All it would do is make a creepy laughter sound, no matter what icon was touched. If Apple thinks that blind people would prefer to listen to laughter, without any words to be found anywhere, then they don't get it.

I'm sorry for ranting here, but shame on Apple for taking up our valuable memory space and for including the Gester voice, in particular.

Here's hoping that the Eloquence Reed speech qualities will be improved in the near future.

Space with 2-8 will toggle the Option key on. You can also use space with 2-7 which isn't a toggle, but you have to get that dot 8 in there quickly.

I'm not finding this, no. Just the issues I documented above. What iPhone are you using?

I am using an iphone se third gen. For me, as soon as i press the "next app" command and I see the caption panel expand or collapse that is when it goes nuts. Am I doing something wrong, how do i get the caption thing to go away?

Hello. I am using the new Eloquence on an iPhone 12 Mini. It is very very snappy, and Braille Screen Input, is faster than it has ever been with Alex. I am using the Reed voice. I am sorry that others have not found Eloquence to be quite as positive as I have.

In the App Switcher, VoiceOver appears to be speaking both the preview icon and the text associated with that icon, giving one the nonvisual impression that the app is in the App Switcher more than one time. You might, for example, hear something like "Messages" and when you flick again, "messages, active". I reported this problem to Apple only to learn that it has already been identified. It will probably take months to get fixed<smile>.

Hello. Apple has made it a bit more difficult in iOS 16 to record an audio message directly from the Messages app. You have to bring up the list of apps available in Messages and then double tap on Audio. The positive here is that you no longer have to hold down the Record button when creating an audio message. But having the apps show on one's screen does create more than a little clutter which I would just as soon not have there.

Curtis, hope it doesn't take years <giggles>!

Hello. I am currently using eloquence in iOS 16. I have found that using the eddie voice sounds a bit less muffled than the reed voice.

Hi,
I didn't experience this bug until I updated bitlife just to make sure the update to bitlife was accessible before updating to the new bitlife on my iOS 15 main bitlife device (that's how important bitlife is to me). Anyway, I'm impacted by the direct touch issue, but I didn't have to reboot to fix it. I just went back to bitlife and went to direct touch with my rotor, and turned it off, and knock on wood, regular iOS features function as normal. It's a good thing I don't play bitlife on my iOS 16 device, but that teaches me I'm not updating my gaming device to iOS 16, that's for sure.

As for identifying music, it's no big deal for me, I always identified it from the control center, because when I'd ask siri to do it, I'd have nosy people around me thinking I was talking to them, from the control center, I can do it stealthily, but that's neither here nor there.

But maybe if you don't want to reboot your device, and you need a direct touch app, try turning direct touch off when you're done with the app. I didn't have a focus issue in bitlife for the two minutes I played, but I couldn't activate settings in the settings app, and apps on my home screen would act like they were editing. It's almost like it gets stuck in a state of direct touch. You might have to be patient to get the rotor to work within a direct touch app, but just try it, that's going to be easier, at least for me, than rebooting the phone, that's just a royal pain to me.

GOOD LUCK!!!!

How do I ad a widget in the lock screen with VO?

I've already made this a separate topic, but I thought I may as well post it here as well. All of my pronounciations have ceased to work. The voices speak the words as though a pronunciation entry was added. Also, dictating pronunciations no longer works, though I think that's been around since iOS 15.
Alex has also changed. His intonation is now weird on a lot of words, such as link and button.

The bottom toolbars like Back, Share, Tabs etc. collapse arbitrarily at any time during the web browsing. Imo this is a regression from IOS15 where they remain active at the bottom of the page unless collapsed manually.
There is no volume slider on the playing controls on the lockscreen while audio is playing. Since other controls are to be performed onscreen, it would be more handy to have the volume slider also present, as in IOS15.

In IOS15 turning of focus from the lockscreen did not require touch ID, whereas in 16 first touch ID has to be entered before turning any of the focus off.
Ava ENHANCED, which was my go to voice in IOS15, is now sounding weird, don't know how to explain this, but the differences are clearly there if the voice is compared between the two OS.

Hi all,
I’m using IPhone 12 Pro with ios 16 since last night.
I use backtap to go to app switcher usually. It doesn’t seem to work anymore. I cannot even go to app switcher from sliding from the bottom screne.
Any solutions?
Thank you and have a smashing day ahead!

Scroll back to the the post that you are replying to and check what's said under “Serious Bugs”. This should answer your question.

Looks like you can't delete Siri voices even when switching to a different region.

They keep returning once you change back.

Obviously, you can't delete voices while you're using them, before you could and it would default to Samantha or another default voice.

Now, if you download a Siri voice, good luck removing it because it'll keep coming back.

Hi, Thank you so much for your assistance. I am aware of the fact that the app-switcher bug is present with enabling invert colours systemwide or with per app settings. I do not have systemwide invert colours turned on, neither do I have invert colours turned on with per app settings, hence I posted the issue here.
Surprisingly, even when VO is turned off, the BackTap gesture does not perform as it should, point in question being my mom's Phone 10R, she is sighted and does not use VO.
I have contacted apple about it.
Thank you and have a good day!

Try to reset it again, turn it off and on to see if it helps. You never know.

After ios16 update Iphone SE home button has started making a whooshing sound sometimes? Does anybody know what this is?

It's thesound to bring the screen lower on big devices to make it easier to access something. People with a large phone use it a lot.

Sounds to me like Reachability mode may have been enabled:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/iphone/iph145eba8e9/ios

So... how would I turn it off?

Oh whoops, didnt see that there LOL. Thanks!

I'm thinking touch id before turning a focus off is a feature rather than a bug.

One thing I've noticed with the App Switcher is when flicking up with three fingers to close an app, the gesture doesn't work the first time but does after the second.