VoiceOver seems to respond more slowly in iOS 16

By Ricardo Brandão, 17 December, 2022

Forum

iOS and iPadOS

Hello guys, I hope and wish you all well. I don't know if it's something about me, but I realized that VoiceOver has a considerably slow response in iOS 16 compared to iOS 15. I still use a Vocalizer voice, considerably more responsive than Siri voices, but I still notice a certain slowness when navigating, for example, between the folders on my home screen using gestures. I made a direct comparison with my iPhone 6s, which is still in iOS 15.7, and it managed to be considerably faster than my iPhone 11 Pro Max in iOS 16. It is worth remembering that I did a clean installation of the system through iTunes, to see if it solved the problem. My question is: am I going crazy? Kkkk! Thank you in advance for the answers...

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Re: VoiceOver seems to respond more slowly in iOS 16

I unfortunately do not have a solution for you, but I can confirm that you are not going crazy.
I held out on iOS 16 as a result of all the accessibility bugs.
I just upgraded when 16.2 dropped, as it appeared that the majority were solved.
Oh how I've come to regret doing that.
Not only is performance slower when swiping, but weirdly faster when exploring, the Australian Karen voice has lost a huge amount of its simbalance, and sounds reminiscent of "good old" (air quotes) 3G GSM compression.

Joyous to the day.

RE: Adam M

Yeah, boy, but I realized that I updated for the first time, also to iOS 16.1. I also noticed an unnecessary overheating of the iPhone when performing simple tasks, such as listening to music or switching between multiple applications, something that did not happen in iOS 15. I don't understand that... I need more proof of this behavior to take the case to Apple's accessibility team.

Big hug and a great day!

I have switched to the US English voice

Hey there hope this message finds you well.

I changed to Alex since it is faster then the rest of the vocalizer voices and it has least pronunciation problems.

I am an Englishman and love to use my phone in British English, however, the voices are awful. Vocalizer has gotten worse. and hope apple fixes the quirkiness.

Potential Work-around

Hi,

I am a new AppleVis user and have been using Apple products for over 6 years. VoiceOver does indeed have slower response times in iOS 16 in terms of swiping, as far as I've noticed. The Vocalizer premium-quality voices have slowed the response times further, especially the ones that take up 200+ mb, because those voices require more processing power. I do have a potential work-around that might fix your problem:

1: Go to Settings>Accessibility>VoiceOver>Speech>Voice.

2: Choose a MacOs, Eloquence, or Novelty voice (I like using Eloquence).

3: Now switch back to your previous voice.

Because the Mac and Eloquence voices need very little processing power, this can help "encourage" VoiceOver, therefore making it a bit faster. Note however that this is only temporary and you will need to do the above steps again after turning VoiceOver off and back on, after your iPhone/iPad restarts, and, sometimes, when switching apps using the 4-finger swipe left or right gestures.

Hope this helps.

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