voiceover and ios 17.0.2

First off, nice to see another Murphy on here. :) second, if you really aren't using many apps on the phone, I'm worried about you and how you'll get along with a Mac. simply put, if you are this frustrated by what you have now, add about five million and a case of scotch and beer to that. For instance, if you encounter an edit field, sometimes you can write in it, sometimes, you have to move focus by pressing voice over space, or sometimes, you are faced with an unlabeled button, you just have to click. tables... You have to interact with them, then usually again just to get something accomplished. I went all in as my box of the day was dead in the water. However here is where i'm different. Mac's are around a thousand dollars plus. You can get a cheap windows box for like 200 and be just fine. what worries me is the attitude of, I don't know how to do this, or I can't, so let me go back to Windows, because that's what i know. I jumped in face first. Is Apple great? no, as I see it because they have their hands in seven, operating systems. Home pod, Mac OS, IOS, iPad OS TV OS, the Vision pro OS, and watch OS. depending on how you learn and your acceptance to be a little convoluted, you can get things done. Patience grasshopper. If you want help I can do what I can. Just don't try once, get pissed off and sell it. For me, the Mac is underdeveloped because blind people use Windows, and there is a very inaccessible market that can be tamed. But most of them want something for nothing. Watch when someone puts out a beta test request. either they don't follow instructions, or just want a free, whatever. Let me know if I can help. Sorry this was long.

did you mean 17.0.2?
if yes, that was a minor patch that shouldn't bug out anything.

I forgot to correct him. Oops? Murphy's don't stick up for each other lmao

Firstly, the Siri voices pronouncing "button" as "butten" is not a new thing. Sorry..
As Siobhan stated, if you are using Windows, stick with Windows. Apple really fubar'ed the latest round of software updates, and you will likely just be frustrated if you attempt to learn Mac at this stage. Windows these days is a solid system and with screen readers such as JAWS and NVDA, you will do just fine. In fact, if you only use a computer for casual internet functionality, then Windows Narrator should suffice. This is built into Windows as of Windows 8, so no worries about downloading unfamiliar software.

Regarding Full Apple, while I cannot speak for anyone else, I personally went Apple (iPhone) in 2012, and Full Apple (iPhone & MacBook Pro) in 2014. Before my MacBook I was using a 1st Gen Chromebook.
Don't judge me.... 😳

Like many here, I have witnessed the evolution of Apple over the past decade, and while I tend to lean toward Apple in terms of mainstream assistive technology, I feel like Apple has lost their focus over the past few years.

/end 2¢

One difference between apple and fs is that apple will request logs and such from you and are willing to try to track down the bug, fs will just blame your system and that's their story and they are stickin to it.

Thought by now the Murphy people would get their own law. The murphy law what can go wrong goes wrong specially with anyone name Murphy. This is an old issue regarding how voiceover or siri says button.

For Windows I prefer NVDA over anything else on that platform. There are so many reasons, but one of the coolest features is to have a portable copy that runs directly from a thumb drive without requiring installation onto another computer. Its a real treat whenever I have to use a different PC for whatever reason, and all I need to do is plug in said thumb drive into the new PC and voila, working screen reader with my personal prefs already in action.
This is essentially the same philosophy behind Apple's Portable Preferences. While every Apple device these days has VO built in, it's nice to be able to plug in a thumb drive and load up your personal VO preferences and get right to work.
At least on Mac computers.

I stand behind my previous comment, that if you only do casual computer stuff, a Windows machine might be less frustrating for you. And in regards to the Siri voice mispronouncing words; at least you can program it to do so correctly from the Pronunciation panel, inside the Speech settings of VO on your iPhone.

HTH. 😅

NVDA like it when I was using it but did not care that I had to purchase eloquence and when I needed to update windows it deleted it and could not install it anymore. Using jaws now.

You should be able to enter the pronunciation feature within VO, double tap add in the top right corner (if I recall correctly), type "Button" without quotes of course, and how it is supposed to be spelled, then in the second entry field spell it however you want to make it "sound" correct. That is how it "should" be working for you.
If it is not, then defenestrate your phone and call it a day. 🫤

Couldn’t you navigate by character over the word bitten and see how its spelling it so you’d know what to change in pronunciation?

Hey Everyone,

I am a voiceover user and the bug I have seen is where when your device gets a notification while you have the device unlocked or you are currently using an app and you get a notification and the voiceover does not read it aloud because it does not auto focus on the notification like it did in iOS 16 and below. I am an Apple person as well when it comes to accessibility on mobile devices. I have not used a Mac that often to know if I like it or not. I know the keyboard commands are different from Windows. Anyway, I hope this bug can be fixed. I have been using the Announce Notifications on Speaker setting to hear all incoming notifications for the time being.

Thanks,

Andrew

This ain't a bug at all! Things are different now. Go to settings / accessibility / voiceover / verbosity / system notifications and there, you'll set how VO reads notifications. You can even have VO set to not read notifications when your phone is silent which I like! HTH. Trust me, I thought it was a bug at first until I looked.

Follow these instructions.
1. Navigate to one of these buttons.
2. The moment VO speaks it aloud, copy VO's last phrase to the clipboard. The default gesture is a 3 finger quadruple tap.
3. Go into the Pronunciation controls, and paste the word you copied by using the rotor to find the "Edit" action, then flicking down and double tapping on "Paste.
4. In the alternate field, i.e. the way you "want" the control" to sound, simply spell out the word anyway you want. For example, if you want the damn button to be pronounced as "banana" then type banana.

Finally, from this point on the control will be spoken aloud as you have set it up in the pronunciation controls.
It. does. not. matter. if. you. can. not. spell. it. letter. by. letter.

A friend first told me about this in the late stages of iOS 15, and it's the kind of thing that once you hear it, you can't unhear it. It seems like a majority of voices don't know how to say the word button at this point. I found a spelling that somewhat worked for US female siri, but it still didn't sound natural. It's one of the reasons I still use Alex, although his new love affair with Samantha which causes them to sing duets is driving me bananas. I really, really hope that something is done about that in the next update. Maybe most people can ignore the mispronunciation of button; wish I was one of them, but for such a simple word to be butchered that badly... It just doesn't make any sense.

Whenever there is a new update, things have to be done afterwards that will drain batteries more rapidly for a few days afterwards. Chances are it will fix itself.

@Holger Fiallo you can download Eliquence for NVDA.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post it here but let's just say it's not legal but I'm using it with no issues. It's a github addon, that's the most I'll say for now.

@Patrick Murphy what people are saying is that if you go into the dictionary, and write the word button, then in the pronounciation field write, buttun, for example, it should workk once you've tapped on done.

I've not done this because I use the alix voice and it doesn't bother me so I can't help anymore than that.

As for windows vs mac, I'd stick with windows personally and try NVDA. Or you could go to an apple shop and try the mac there,, they hsould have apple geniuses I think they call them, to help you.

Except the speech engine is called IBM TTS, and is publicly available. On GitHub that is. It is beautiful, and extremely responsive on NVDA. Thick eloquence, but on steroids. 😀

I honestly don't remember doing it, but somehow, that dictionary entry has disappeared. I can't think when or why I could have possibly deleted it. Sorry about that. As for battery drain, I'm definitely noticing it. I am thinking my phone will need a new battery within the next few months, but as others have said, major battery drain, unfortunately seems to be one of the annoyances in early versions of the update. If I ever figure out what the button fix was, I will try to remember to let you know. *smile*

Disclaimer: I am not doubting anybody's experiences here.

I feel like this must be an iOS 17 exclusive issue. Now, I know that the word "button" has been mispronounced on quite a few of the earlier versions of iOS overall. However, the steps I mentioned previously have always worked for me in regards to "fixing" this issue. The fact that it does not seem to "stay fixed" leads me to believe that it is exclusive to iOS 17.

Thoughts?

If people want to save battery, check YouTube for tips on saving battery. There are many setting on privacy that helps, also background setting. I have all of them off.

I noticed all of my voice overs has been saying button awkwardly since I first joined in for the Apple beta software program back in July. when I updated this device, the iPad seventh generation to iOS 17, beta 4, which is actually my first time joining this program. voiceover has.
multiple bugs when it comes to the word button. as the days have go by, when the original 17 update came around in September, it did fix 90% of the voiceover, however, Apple did left behind Siri voice, one, two, three, four, I mean, five, has been saying button awkwardly sends iOS 15.4. but that’s just normal for Siri voice five but the rest, nope! unacceptable! Especially with the other English accent Siri voiceover.
But they should fix this because if they don’t, I don’t even know what is the whole point of updating every single month and every single week when they never fixes the bugs that people are telling them?

Apparently either Nuance or Apple, or both, have some hidden dictionary, to which we don't have access. I've mentioned this in several other posts. Adding a word as it is (in the way it's written) could still work even if it's spelled in some odd way by VoiceOver that you don't know. So just enter it as "button" and hope that it does work.

Haven't seen the button thing, but I'm using Zoe compact (now just called Zoe) and have noticed the butter issue. It says it almost like budd'hr or something. Read that with Zoe or Samantha. :)

About the original post and macs:
I'm uncertain about the current MacOS; my latest experiences are with High Sierra on Intel of course. I've been meaning to try M1 systems but haven't yet. Apparently they have fixed some of the keyboard to TTS actually speaking lag that is so prominent in stated MacOS versions and prior. I kinda stopped caring about tryna fix the Mac for blind users, because Apple would fix about one in every ten bugs I filed with them.

If you like Windows stick with Windows. However, it's never a bad idea to experiment and at least see if Mac offers something for you that Windows doesn't. Admittedly, it's more about how you like the OS itself compared to Windows. If typical, day-to-day interacttions with things like Mail and Finder are cumbersome, or Safari browsing is painful, I'd not look into it further.
This next paragraph might ruffle some feathers, but I'm gonna just say it.
When I need to get something done, I reach for a Windows machine. Almost everything I need to do can be accomplished easily and quickly with various apps. I have a great media player, file archiver, general productivity stuff like document management etc. However, I basically do all email and simple browsing on a Mac or an iOS device.
MacOS is just better for the solid email. Windows still kinda sucks there. lol.

The thing that I noticed between Mac and Win is mostly how easy and full-featured the apps are. For instance, foobar2000 and XmPlay, both excellent players on Win, support an array of formats and let you convert and organize audio files quickly and with much customization. Upon using the Mac, I had to buy Amadeus pro to get a file converter, Decibel for a half-decent media player, and so on. It's just more BS to get set up. The foobar for Mac these days is much better, but still lacks a conversion utility, 3rd party components, and a keyboard shortcut editor to name just a few things. Those are all vital to a great music player IMO, and so I can't use a Mac for that now. Also, ever try editing ID3 tags on Mac not using iTunes? There's like no good tag editors out there. Or they don't support OPUS format, or VO loses focus everywhere.... It's a stormin' joke.

One note about Windows though before I depart the thread: I'm not thrilled with how needy Microsoft is now. They constantly want you using Edge browser, they always just force install updates without really asking if it's cool or not. They keep nagging me for an online account. True, Apple did that with Apple ID, I hear you say. Well yes, but I don't like that either. I should be able to use my Mac at least without needing to be tethered to the blinkin' internet 24/7.

Bottom line: If you like new stuff, want new voices and a vastly different feeling OS to mess with, MacOS is fun. If you just wanna stick with Windows and NVDA, that's a great option too. It may have seemed like I had nothing good to say about Mac, but it's more like Apple needs to make the focus more on function than how many cameras they can shove into their latest phones. Also I'm typing from an Iphone 15 Pro, so I still think they have the mobile screen reader thing fairly nailed down. It's at least considerably nicer than the toy on MacOS. It has great features but needs pruning and modernizations to beinteresting. Also, app devs are fighting to keep things up to Apple's ever changing standards. It's no wonder Foobar and other apps are so darn slow to mirror their Windows counterparts.

Be well all.