My wife just upgraded to iOS 16.5 and now Voiceover pronounces "pause equals seven one one" on every icon as she navigates. As she goes from icon to icon it says the name of the icon like it should, then adds "pause equals seven one one". I am also at 16.5, I turned Voiceover on and it does not do that for me. We both have iPhone 12s. I told her this sounds like a debug statement that some Apple developer left in, except it does not do that for me.
Anyone else experience this or can make any sense out of it ?
My wife's experience is that Voiceover support is deteriorating over time. It isn't nearly as stable or usable as it used to be.
Comments
Which voice is she using?
I've not heard of this, but it may be voice specific. So, it would be helpful to have this information so people can try to reproduce it.
"clearing the label for the element"
What do you mean by "the element" ? The icon ? And by label do you mean the name of the icon ? If so how can you clear the name, it needs some kind of name. I am sure I am confused, please clarify.
"Which voice is she using?"
Hi Shawn, we are both using Ava Enhanced. I always try to keep my settings the same as her for troubleshooting and I am not having this issue, but its worth trying. I will suggest she switch voices and see what happens. Thanks
Hopefully a solution for you
Hi, I have had this problem for over a year now. I finally figured out how to fix it on my device and hopefully this will fix it for your wife as well. What I had to do was go to the spot on the screen, where you can change pages by swiping up or down with one finger. Once there, double tap and hold a screen with two fingers until the label element. Dialogue appears. Swipe until you find the clear text option and select it. In the edit box type of space, then double tap on safe. You may return to that same location and do the two finger. Double tap to label element option again remove the space and click save if you wish. I found that if you don’t put the space in the first. Time and save it, then it will still repeat The same phrase it was doing.
Changing voices worked
She changed the voice to Allison and that fixed it - for about 15 minutes then it started doing it again. Then she changed to Alex and that fixed it for good. Hmm, wondering if she goes back to Ava if it will still be fixed. Also wondering if its actually the voice or just the act of changing voices.
Anyway, thanks for the suggestion
Activities?
I've had settings get corrupted with activities although they were braille settings.
It might have something to…
It might have something to do with the Vocalizer voices in particular.
Unlike voices by Apple, ETI Eloquence or any other third-party voice, the Vocalizer voices have their own weird dictionary that is out of our control and gets annoying at certain times. Whoever has total control over that dict often adds or edits certain entries, and then they end up ruining a bunch of things when trying to add certain entries to have the voices pronounce certain words in certain ways. We do have the word "an (moment)" in Turkish but it was added to the dictionary as "ın" to pronounce it somewhat closer to how you would pronounce it in English. Though many Turkish speakers would probably pronounce it more like "en", but it's already problematic that anything that does mean something in the voice's own language is added to this dictionary in an attempt to have it pronounced as in another language. I have several other examples but let me keep it short. Anyway, so I used to have this "pause=xyz" thing a while ago. Don't remember the OS version but VoiceOver would say, "Pause eşitlik işareti 3xx" whenever it encountered a certain punctuation mark that I don't remember right now, where "eşitlik işareti" literally means "equality sign". Well, I can't confirm that it was a problem with Vocalizer itself as we didn't have other alternatives to compare back at that time.
Vocalizer voices
Very interesting. So how does one know if a particular voice is from Apple or a third party ?