I’ve got an iPhone SE, latest generation, and my phone recently received the latest update to iOS 16.6. I didn’t notice this until just now, and the update took place several days ago, so it could be coincidental, but I’m experiencing a pretty serious problem in the iMessages app with voiceover.
When on the main page listing all of your conversations, if I swipe past the top conversation in the list, I hear the voice over clicking sound like it’s moving to the next element, but speech goes silent. Then if I try to touch another message anywhere in the list or continue flicking between list items, I get this same behavior. Eventually, speech will sporadically return, but the same problem will keep recurring when I try to navigate to different messages in the list. I closed all my other open apps and restarted my phone, but to my disappointment, the issue persisted. Usually that fixes everything. Lol.
Is anyone else experiencing this?
By Luke, 1 September, 2023
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Comments
voice
Perhaps if you change your voice and see what happens.
Results of changing voices
Interesting. I did find with several of the very low quality voices, like the eloquence voices, that the issue mostly went away. However, these voices are so poor that I can barely understand them and frankly just want a nicer sounding voice. There’s no reason this should be happening just using the standard voices I’ve been using all along.
I have submitted a bug report to Apple Accessibility. I’m still curious if anyone else is experiencing this. I looked through the first few pages of the forum and didn’t see anything about it, surprisingly.
Temporary workaround for anyone else experiencing this problem
Thankfully, VoiceOver has a feature called activities which I just discovered that allows you to automatically switch voiceover settings based on a selected app or context. In this case, I created a new activity named “broken iMessages” (yes, being a bit cheeky) and set that activity’s settings to the eloquence Eddy voice and the desired speech rate etc. I then scrolled down to the bottom of the activity settings page and chose apps and selected iMessages. Now whenever I go into the iMessages app, it switches over to good old robotic Eddie and I don’t experience the dropouts. This allows me to still enjoy the higher quality voices everywhere else and not have to manually switch when I go into iMessages. Obviously this is still far from ideal and needs to be addressed by Apple, but this is a decent compromise until they get it fixed.
Luke
Sad that you had to go through all that to make it work. Have you consider changing the voice just for message. I setup different VO for email, message and music. Somehow it migrated the setting to my watch and sane voices for 3 do it in the watch.
doesn't happen in iOS 17
I have an SE 3 and it doesn't happen on iOS 17.
17?
Is iOS 17 a beta version? My phone is set to automatic updates so I assumed 16.6 was the newest available version
Luke
Yes. it is. The iOS 17 should be out after the Apple event or during. Depends on who you ask. Now the iOS beta is in letter A as apple but is the second A. Next week if Apple does not release the RC, and does not release another beta it might be on the 12 for the RC. Maybe Apple will release another Beta letter A, but never recall Apple releasing 3 letters A.
And now the issue has disappeared
Well, after all that, today I’ve noticed the issue has completely disappeared, so probably chalk this one up to a random fluke. Didn’t sound like it was impacting anyone else so I figured it might be some weird thing going on specific to my phone. Apple Accessibility was kind enough to promptly get back to me when I did report the issue yesterday, so if the issue creeps back up again I will follow their steps for logging it and sending it to them. Please respond if you do experience this issue because I am still curious if it was just me