I’m running 16.4.1 on a 12Pro Since updating to this version, the (already present) problems with VO focus moving around erratically have worsened dramatically. In Safari, for example, when I am in the middle of a page, it will sometimes randomly announce “screen curtain on” and shoot focus back up to the top. (Note: screen curtain is on, but it has been on throughout).
Is anybody else encountering this weirdness, and, if so, have you found a setting or anything else to alleviate the problem?
By Carla Campbell, 21 April, 2023
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Comments
Common Problem
Lots of people are going through these issues with the update. Apparently, it is caused partly by VO crashing.
And all too frequent
Sometimes it's happening every few seconds, making my phone almost unusable. Aaarrg!
Not Even Sure How to Describe the problem
I’m still trying to figure out how to describe this problem in order to officially report it (for whatever good that might do.) For me, it’s repeatable but not predictable. If it’s VO crashing, it’s recovering quickly, in that ther’s no delay between reading something, having it say “screen curtain on” and popping to a seemingly random location.
It seems much better in 16.5 beta 2
I updated about 4 hours ago and haven’t had a crash since then. I was just about to come here and tell everyone and as this page was loading it crashed. Still, seems vastly improved. If its not actually improved but restarting my phone helped then thats still interesting because I’ll just restart my phone twice a day but so far the crashing seems if not fixed, much better. If anyone wants to install public betas you just need to go to settings, system updates, beta program and switch on public betas.
Troubleshooting ideas?
Hi all
So I'm still on 16.2 but I was just wondering, for those who experience these frankly unacceptable bugs this late in the IOS 16 cycle.
Two things
1. Which devices are the crashes occurring on?
2. Voices, which type are they? Compact, premium, high. A siri voice?
Maybe certain types of voices cause Voiceover to crash and not others.
Finally, has anyone performed a soft reset of there device? Note: not a shutdown.
Thinking soft reset may help.
Of course, these are just simply ideas.
Hang in there everyone! I'm really rooting that 16.5 clears it all up for whom these bugs may be pestering. (no pun intended).
Voiceover Glitch That's eight Months Old.
I'm very familiar with the problem you're experiencing, and can pretty much nail down what's happening. What you're going through is not a focus problem. It's Voiceover continuously crashing. The only thing you can do to fix the problem is start deleting content off your device until it stops crashing voiceover. If you have a lot of audio content stored, toast it. If you have a lot of video content stored, toast it. that's unfortunately the only way to fix the problem unless you switch completely to a voice like Eloquence or one of the compact voices. What's basically happening is that your device is thinking that too much ram is being used, and that there's not enough space left on the device to provide the ram necessary to run both voiceover and any other apps that may be even the slightest bit ram-heavy. Apple has known about this bug and consistently not fixed it since iOS16.0 back in September of last year. I was one of the first to report the bug and have been battling with them for the past eight months to try to get them to fix it, but once the report goes out of the hands of the accessibility team and into the hands of the engineering team, any and all work on the problem comes to a complete halt.
RE: Troubleshooting ideas?
It doesn't matter what device it is. And any higher quality voices like the enhanced or premium voices will suffer said crashes, although I've also heard of Eloquence voices suffering the crashes periodically, unless, as I said in the last post, you wipe your audio content and so forth and leave half your device's available space empty. That's the only workaround I've so far found for the problem, since apple seems to be in no hurry to address the problem and squash the bug.
Blind user:
My Voiceover keeps crashing".
Apple:
"We'll look into it".
Sighted user:
"My photos won't load properly".
Apple:
"We'll have it fixed next week".
Alex voice
On my side, the crash bug was occurring as soon as I tried to use one of the Siri voices, whatever language. No more crashes when I use the UK English Jamie or more surprisingly, the US English Alex voice. Using iOS 16.4.1 with an iPhone 11 pro 64 gig. Around 20 gig of free space. It does seem that the problem comes from the voice you are using, especially the Siri ones.
Steve
Hey Steve,
Video and audio stored on an iPhone are stored in long term SSD, not short term ram, aren't they? So, how would their presence in long term memory affect VoiceOver if there was also a substantial amount of free and unused long term memory space? I'm having the bug, but I have well over 100gb of free memory space.
Also, I cleared everything open in my app track, rebooted my iPhone to clear ram, opened a text based game, and immediately ran into the same bug, so ram space isn't the issue. Something else must be causing VoiceOver to crash, assuming the bug actually is caused by VoiceOver crashing, that is.
My own suspicion is that IOS 16.4 or just 16 is the problem, and I doubt IOS 16 is causing VoiceOver to crash. Furthermore, I've identified a spot in my audible app where, if I press the back up 15 seconds button, audible will back up the audio 15 seconds, and focus will go to the top of the page. However, if I press the back up 15 seconds button and immediately swipe down to fast forward 15 seconds, focus will not move, let alone jump to the top of the page. This suggests to me that something else is going on.
In conclusion, I suggest to everyone reading this that they might want to hold off from deleting all their video and audio. I myself have over 67gb of music alone, and I have no desire to remove all that and then try to get it back into my phone.
Joy!
Bruce