Here Is Apple Accessibility's Latest Statement On The iOS Focus Bug

Ok, I'm not a native speaker of English but I understand enough to enjoy this conversation.
I'm not an idiot and I don't get offended LOL
Yes, bugs are often annoying hahahaha
Calm down.
I'm now enjoying a Wychwood Hobgoblin IPA out on my balcony since the sun is shining.
However, now my hands are shaking/trembling as hell.
The cure is one more Hobgoblin.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
Have a good one folks.

Trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrllll!!! Longtail iOS 15
I want to watch the higher up is this website of thinking of this conversation, that would be like what the heck are these people on!! L O L c

Like I said, defensiveness, criticism, and nothing productive. This site is for everybody. And not everybody is able to use the devices equally. I want to be able to choose who I get to interact with. Some people who want to interact with everyone. Some people will want to be helpful and teach the novices. Some people like to deal with people on their level. As it stands, this is not a place where meaningful communication occurs. I usually come on here for one reason, and one reason alone. Two see if anybody else is going through any of the bugs that I’m going through. And generally speaking, instead of complaining, I gather whatever tiny pieces of information I can and submit bug reports. I don’t care about anything else really. I don’t really care about peoples criticisms. I only care about improving the overall platform. Or, eventually moving onto a better software solution.

Re elitism. I agree with you, there is nothing at all wrong with elitism in fact, I’d say human betterment depends on the best of us doing our best. What I don’t support so freely is an assumption of ones self as elite leading to a secondary assumption that I deserve more. Elite performers in any field will tend to excel and be rewarded accordingly but requesting special places for the elite to reside feels a little more icky. You might disagree and I could see your point of view but I think I’m sticking where I am for now.

Less serious. A banner just below the applevis our community is diverse and inclusive banner. A secondary banner with B****h fight of the week, a selection of the most community minded comments curated for your pleasure.

Happy accident.
I downloaded iOS 17 with the intention of installing it but then got cold feet because Cobbler commented that he was still experiencing the focus bug. I intended to just delete the download as and when with no reason to hurry but my phone had other ideas. While I was in the shower it started the installation without me needing to agree to anything. Apparently simply hitting download and install is enough to, well download and install. In previous years I am pretty sure it needed more steps than that. Agreeing to the license twice at the very least. Well I now have iOS 17 and it’s a much much more calm and serene place to be so far. I’m still getting a few focus jump issues but for now at least, it’s something I can deal with and my phone feels like a much more sensible, much less chaotic place. Thanks to all who gave their experiences and sorry to cobbler, I don’t know how bad your issues are with focus jumping but if it was anything like mine, you have my full empathy and I very very much hope you see an improvement in coming beta releases. For now, I can at least use my phone without constant frustration.

Maybe you had automatic updates enabled

I've been running the beta since the first developer release and have noticed no discernible improvement in the focus issue. This includes the latest developer release.

As other people's comments indicate, your own experience may be different.

Hi, It sounds like you are experiencing similar issues to me. Is it happening literally hundreds, maybe over a thousand times a day? I wouldn’t be able to write anything without navigating back to the text box every 5 - 10 words. In apps I’d be flicking through the content and be back at the top multiple times a minute. That seems to be better for me, the focus isn’t rock solid. It still moves but nowhere near as often. I was getting to the point of nuking my phone and starting out fresh with a completely new installation, no apps, no history of even messages. Have you thought about that? My plan was to do a backup then try a nuked fresh install and potentially go back to the backup if it didn’t help. I know it’s not ideal but it’s the only idea I had left. You might not want to but I thought I’d let you know where I was this morning and where you might want to go if it’s for you.

I still can’t grapple the thought of why Apple can’t fix the fact that you can’t select a Wi-Fi network using VoiceOver when you get to the activate your Mac screen on an Apple Silicon MacBook if you received it, that’s not right for you Apple

Well I wasn’t necessarily thinking new phone but completely resetting my current 14 Pro Max then instead of restoring from a backup just setting it up as a completely new phone. So the number and phone would be the same but I’d be starting with a completely fresh instance of iOS then as you say, install apps and hope no camels get broken backs.

The storage issue was a good thing really. I mean it’s annoying I can’t use over 50% of my phones storage but at least the VO crash where it would constantly say screen curtain on has finally gone away. It didn’t fix the focus jumping around the screen issue which seems to have largely been fixed by my accidental installation of iOS 17. It’s still not great. Focus will move from time to time but I can cope with that. It’s the constant jumping of focus that caused me so much frustration. Many times a minute I’d have to work out where I was and how to get back to where I had been. If you did want to try nuking your phone and starting from fresh, the procedure would be, ensure you have a backup, reset your phone, when it boots up and asks if you’d like to set up as a new phone, restore from backup or transfer from existing iPhone. Select set up as a new phone. That way nothing would be brought over and it would be the same as buying a new phone from the Apple Store and never having had a phone before. You’d then install the apps you need and keep your fingers crossed. You’d still have a backup you could restore though if you decided the improvements weren’t worth losing your content for or it didn’t solve the problem.

I was agreeing with you about elitism! Perhaps I was insufficiently Patrician in the way I did so?

There should be only one rule on this site: render unto caesar; and I'll let you decide who is caesar, and who is to do the rendering.

I’m not deciding anything. If we’re quoting the big man’s boy, I’m not getting involved otherwise I’ll be getting myself into many more of those B***Hfights. I’m done for today, fun though it’s been. I would however be a little disappointed if you weren’t just a tad patrician. I’d hope something would have rubbed off in the hallowed halls of Oxford.

I meant that if you're reading a thread and don't like how it;s going then you can just move along.

I should have been more clear in my last post.

I think the only time I've heard petrission used is in diskworld.

@ash I think you can contact the modirators of the website, perhaps you could explain your idea to them? Although I have a question, how would you decide who is an expert and so on?

Anyone can tikc a box after all.

andy, I certainly am told I can be very patrician when the occasion rewquires. It is a highly useful attribute. I have left a very patrician comment on that post about describing photos with Bing.

Setting up the phone as new does wonders sometimes actually. I remember doing that a few years ago when I had that awful battery drain bug that came with IOS Unlucky 13 as Macavity the Mystery cat used to call it. Resetting all settings did not make a blind bit of difference in that particular scenario. setting up new worked wonderfully. but it's such a lot of hassle, isn't it? Maybe i could cure the crashing but that way - I don't know. I don't have time to experiment, however.

screen curtain on.

Sorry, just my little joke - somewhat plebian in nature, I know.

Your commoner high jinx and tomfoolery genuinely made my heart drop then explode in unabashed joy at a great prank delivered perfectly.

Yes, I agree that setting up as new often solves a lot of issues.
However, it's a hassle as you point out.
I used to set up as new phone for every new major iOS update but now there's a lot going on on my phone requiring more effort to completely wipe it and set up as new.
I'm seriously considering it when iOS 17 is ready to install though.
On another note I guess it's about time to upgrade my quite old XR now anyways and with a new device I always set up as new.
There is only one problem to that and it's me don't wanna spend the money to upgrade to an iPhone 15 for instance.
But who knows and I know that I can't use my XR forever.

I tried similar with unenhanced Karen which sounds dodgy but you know what I mean. I didn’t notice a difference but that was back in the darkest days before iOS 17 got accidentally installed. I might do the same and try her again as I’m still having focus issues, they are far far less and so tolerable now. I also have 150GB free which somehow helped with the VO crashing bug so I am dealing with a lot less problems so a smaller voice might make a bigger difference now. Either way. I’m so relieved to have a mostly usable phone for the first time in a long time.

Have you guys thought about using another web browser and seeing if there was a diffirence?

I’m using iOS 17, and force of adjust crashed on me. Using my, mums, trustee iPhone SE.

I use both Safari and Chrome and VoiceOver restarts / go to the top of the page in both browsers.
I've gotten used to it now but still a bit annoying.
Especially while reading a long article when VO suddenly decides to revert to the top.
It's a bit cumbersome getting back to where I was in the article to continue reading where I left off when VO crashed.
This seems to never happen when using a compact voice though as others has pointed out.
However, I'm back with SIRI voices because of the nice quality.

I've been a loyal user of unenhanced Karen for years and alas she does nothing to resolve this bug as far as I can tell. Open a link in new tab? Back to top. Click a link in a long email? Back to top. Turn off Voiceover for a second to zoom in on something and back on? You guessed it, back to top. Do nothing for a second too long? There she goes. Switch out of the app for a moment to check something? Nope, back to top. It even happens in Messages and on Discord with no warning. The brief time we had good focus in iOS 15 was so nice, I wish we could get that level of stability and bare bones basic functionality back. I'd love it if anyone working on these updates had to use Voiceover with them for just a whole day, I bet that would fix a lot of issues.

If Apple devs had to rely on VO for a single day, they’d realise how broken it is and how not fit for purpose. I wonder if theres a way of communicating that to them in a non offensive way? Like a challenge or something. Survive a day with screen curtain turned on. They’d see that VO isn’t what they think it is. In short, it’s broken and people are suffering who don’t need to suffer. Apple like to advertise that their products enable incredible things which can be true but suffering shouldn’t be one of those things it enables. Mine is quite a lot better since iOS 17 but it’s still not in any way good. I mean the most basic thing for any screen reader is always and I mean always talk and always stay where you were put. Niether of those things are currently true. It’s not good enough and it makes me so sad that they’ve allowed this to happen.

A nice letter to him requesting that he becomes more knowledgeable about the issue with reporting issues with accessibility with bugs. I am sure he only has some understanding of what is going on with reporting bugs and addressing them. Sometimes I hear he read the emails he gets.

I haven’t sent any. I haven’t written anything yet that I feel confident in. I don’t want to go on for too long but I want to get the point across that there are serious issues that he needs to be aware of because of the impact they’re having on an entire demographic. Maybe I’ll get round to sending one some day. Fingers crossed but it’s a big thing that needs to be right and I don’t think I’m there yet.

Well, I think I may have finally run across this bug in a couple places, but nothing deal breaking. iPhone 12 mini iOS 16.6. Probably not going to install the 17 beta at this point since some people are saying there are still some battery life kinks that need to be worked out. Although it's always YMMV.

Tonight I went down a google rabbit hole and ended up looking at a buyer's guide on pcmag.com. I noticed VO jumping around and figured this must be what everyone has been talking about, so I tried seeing if I could figure out what would trigger it. . I think it might have to do with whatever code all these big sites use that have a lot going on, like adds, embedded videos, and social media sharing links among probably other things (I do use an add blocker).

I noticed that as I scrolled down the page, VO kept jumping back to the top of the article, or to the controls for the video that would sometimes show up. I tried three finger flicking to get past whatever VO didn't like, but it always jumped back to the same place. Same thing happened if I used the scroll bar; it would jump whenever it got past 20% down the page.

The only way I could read anything was turning on Safari Reader, and even that wasn't perfect. VO would still jump back up the page, but if I just touched somewhere in the middle of the screen, I could keep reading where I left off.

I tried switching from Eloquence to Samantha compact and that didn't make a difference. I also tried closing all of my active apps and refreshing the page with no luck either. I did a force restart of my phone, and didn't see the issue come back when I reloaded the page in Safari.

I'm wondering if VoiceOver just has a hard time with some of these more complex websites. I don't see the focus issue on sites like this one, like some other people do. I also don't see it in other apps that I use all the time. It's just so weird that the bug affects everything on some people's phones and then others don't see it at all.

I experience the focus bug in almost every app, including native iOS ones. It's atrocious on Dystopia and Instagram, less common in mail, and very annoying in Messages and Discord when I finally found the text box only to have my cursor launch somewhere random. This is a Voiceover bug alas, not just Safari or web specific. And I've experienced it on three different phone models. It was a problem in iOS 14, got fixed in 15, and in 16 it's been so horrible and omnipresent that I've considered just foregoing having a smartphone altogether sometimes. Hell, it even happens on the lock screen.

Hi, I just spoke with apple to report a bug with the 1 finger double tap not working consistently and also brought up the VO crashing bug, saying "screen curtain on" and he said that is a serious bug that should get fixed for sure. He let me know that if people having this issue could take a screen shot as soon as possible when this occurs, at least 3 times, it would make it easier for the engineers to pin point what is causing this issue. The screen shots are helpful because it provides a time stamp and when you give the log from your phone, the engineers will be able to see what happened in the phone which caused VO to crash. He let me know that having more people reporting the bugs and share logs and screen shots will help getting fixes for the bugs sooner because VO has a much smaller amount of users. He felt really bad how VO users have to suffer with bugs for so long.
Hope this info helps.
Cheers

First off let me start out by saying that I am not currently having this problem. I am on an iPhone 12 with a relatively clean install of iOS 17, but even on 16 I've never experienced this.
I think we need to look at factors that might be contributing to this problem instead of just blanket statements that it's an issue without really looking at the causes.
First off, what devices are you guys using? How much space do you have? How many apps are installed? When you got your device, did you set up as new or restore from an iCloud back up? I get that a lot of this doesn't sound important, but because VoiceOver is directly integrated into the OS, it really is. This isn't like a third-party screen reader that is bolted on after the fact, VO is integrated deeply into the operating system and that is by design.
Likely the reason that some people have this problem while others don't is down to specific configurations. I think as a community we really need to get better about looking at this stuff, and it will only help when filing bug reports. Hope this issue gets solved for you soon.

Having someone just say, I don't have the problem, whatever it is, is most certainly not helpful in the slightest. i can understand Ash's frustration as I to at times have been bogged down by the sheer number of complaints on a litany of topics, except when I try to ask an intelligent question, I'm probably not even read yet. Although the proposed system does have it's flaws that ash had suggested I personally would like to see advanced categories of things like podcasts, or forum topics so that if someone doesn't know how to help another user, they aren't just left hanging with a, I don't know type of response. I'd love to see more of the Mac Os side of things come out to play not just IOS which this is discussing. I'd love to have a Mac topic devoted to this since I've had jumping to the top of web pages sometimes out of nowhere. I know the moderators have lives, families etc, but if posts inundated with grammar and spelling errors can just go by the wayside, is it any wonder people can't be bothered to really help when they can't make heads or tails of the obviously well intentioned user? Here's hoping there are more beta testers and a larger reporting of any issues.

dear one.When I had issues in the past with unlucky 13 people were all over me and talk about how nice iOS 13 was for them. Maybe some supported me.

Honestly, when I hear members of Generation Z talking about being bogged down by the sheer amount of content to which they are exposed I think to myself: wait a minute, aren't you the folk who spend all day on your phones twittering and tweeting your negative thoughts and reading about what some celebrity who doesn't know or care who you are had for breakfast? Is it only we geriatric millennials have the in-built equivalent of a Microsoft Excel filter? Come on, folks, filter by selected cells value! Take Brad's advice and move along! If you don't like Bingo's condescending and supercillious commentary, Bingo won't even notice if you put the mental bblue pencil through it! If you fear that dominic's boomerang wont' come back, so to speak, then feel free to miss out on his latest story about being locked out of something or nothing or something other than the thing he was trying to access which might have been nothing anyway it just wasn't the something it would have been if apple accessibility hadn't insisted on saying nothing about something to him because of his age. These days, honestly! People complaining about complaining? Build back better! Who remembers that, I wonder?

footnote: I have no evidence that Siobhan, or anyone else for that matter, is a member of Generation Z, not least because I am not entirely sure where that generation begins. I know for a fact that I am a geriatric millennial but I have major issues about that classification's boundaries. it should not take in people born in 1984; indeed it should not. if you were born then you won't remember dial telephones, the cold war or waiting half an hour for a computer game to load. Blimey imagine if this place had existed then...

I'm born in 79 and I'm just annoyed at how people don't help but do more harm then good, which was my only gripe. I'll help as often as I can. Next time, read between the lines, bingo, sir, ok? I was merely asking for more substantial content then what most of these posts degenerate to as of this one. I was trying to help dominic sorry if it didn't appear that way but even you yourself have grown a bit tiresome of such posts. Anyway all's well that ends well.

Bingo, it’s Axel, not Twitter. Musk ruins everything, and now what. We’re supposed to drive bloody teslas and bloody Toyota hybrid and God knows whatever electric vehicles around the costs 27,694,8$74,624,987.99. No, they definitely cost less, but still. And if they’re helping the environment, which they kinda aren’t. I don’t see how, why, electric vehicles? I hope you mean by me considering they still have an exhaust pipe and some still has the option to use petrol. Not to mention some governments want carbon emissions. Done something by 2030. Some, if not all, countries, I’m going to make it in time for the 2030 deadline. Which means, nuclear, common. Incoming. Time for the war. get your popcorn vehicles and it’s time to ride the way
My dad has a 2017 Toyota Colorado no Holden. Sorry my bad. He got the DPF removed from it because he was annoying him. That could get him in serious legal trouble sooner or later but yeah
Back to this VoiceOver issue, I’ve only had VoiceOver focus crush on me like two or six times since I installed iOS 17 in June, which is a massive, vast improvement from iOS 16, where I had VoiceOver crashing on me like four times an hour each Day..

I'm not sure what generation I'm counted as.

Some sources say that the millennial generation starts at 1980, some say it starts at 1981.

A similar thing with generation Z.

Now I'm all confused, what were we talking about again?

No matter, this thread has already gone off the rails

siobhan, I'm afraid there's too much information on this thread to read between the lines. I think 1979 puts you just before the geriatric millennial generation.

Dominic, what was all that about? A question often asked on this site, that one. Never mind the environment and electric cars; suffice to say that rain saved Australia from losing the Ashes.

back to the focus bug, and setting up as new. genuine, serious question alert: if one sets up as new, does one then have to mannually input all passwords from before? I remember when I set up as new |I wrote down every password I had before I did so, just in case; but I can't now remember whether, when I set up as new, I then had to reenter all my passwords for bBC, JustEat, dropbox and what have you. while I agree that setting up as new undoubtedly cleans up the device, it would be a real disincentive if I had to re-enter all or most app passwords.

This topic.
Time to go, bang my head against and while because I have lost all my brain cells

I remember 1979. Phones were still attached to the wall with wires, and the Pong home console required aluminum foil at the ends of some of the C cell batteries because batteries leaked and ate away the contact tabs back then. It wasn't until later that you could blow dust out of the cartridge to get a video game working...
that being said, I seem to remember iCloud storing my passwords and giving them to a new phone a few years back by syncing, and this wasn't the cloning thing the iPhones do nowadays by rubbing screens together.

Y’all are so old

At least I never had to feed punch cards into a computer to run a program.
My only advice, Dominic, remember all these devices you are using now and their bugs. You can ramble on about them to young people when you get old. Your iPod will be the old, wooden wagon wheel one of these days.

If you use a password manager like iCloud Passwords, you should be able to restore them when signing into your Apple ID, or whatever account they sync through, without needing to restore from a backup.

Back in my day, we had tape recorders/players, tapes, videoe tapes, records were just going out of stile and cartoons were good.

Ok, I'm not that old, I'm 30 but as old bear said, one day our phones will be old and we'll have to tell kids about the old days where touch screens were cool and GPT 4 was fasinating, of course we'll say this whilst being connected brain to brain or using smellovission.

In fact, there are two things:

One) the focus problem exists, at least since iOS 13, I have tried it on all the devices that run the iOS system that I could have contact. If it doesn't happen for everyone, at least for the vast majority of users, yes.

Two) I find it very interesting to read the posts and comments here on the site, but lately, especially when it comes to some bug or some beta version of Apple's systems, a lot of people are here just to cause discussion with each other instead of effectively contributing to the community. I'm not a moderator, I'm far from being, but we're here to collaborate and not to fight

The first rule about AppleVis Fight Club is, "Nobody talks about AppleVis Fight Club!"

Your welcome. 🤨