looking for a shortcuts tutorial using voiceover

What do you want to do with Shortcuts? Since iOS 15, when Shortcuts was re-designed, accessibility went downhill all the time. If you want to do simple things, it's doable, but if you want to dive deeper, it's very frustrating to use and mess around with all the VoiceOver-related issues.

Using Shortcuts

If you open Shortcuts app, you should select the shortcuts tab and search for "new shortcut". Double-tap on that button.

Now, you are in the Shortcut editor. From there, you can add and edit actions to the shortcut. Actions are simple functions that you can group together in order to create your own application flow. Each action publishes an output associated with a specific type which will then be processed by the following action. For example, imagine you want to create a shortcut that outputs "Hello World". In order to create this, you have to add two actions (Yes, it's doable with only one action too, but I want to show how the actions work together which is the core concept of Shortcuts):

• Text. You can find this via "Search apps / actions search field at the bottom of the phone's screen. Activate the search field and type in "Text". Otherwise, you can explore the screen and find the categories like Media, Scripts, Web, and so on, each of them holding an amount of several actions. Once you found the desired action, swipe down with one finger until you hear "Add to shortcut" and double-tap.
• Show alert. This action will print the text output from the Text action to the user.

If you've added the two actions, close the search screen and find the text action within the Shortcut editor. VoiceOver should say "Text". Unfortunately, the navigation within the shortcut editor is very messy. Now, swipe right with one finger until you hear "Text, Text field". Then, double-tap. The keyboard comes up and you can enter some text. Once you've done that, navigate to the show alert action. On that action, swipe down with one finger again and customize it with the appropriate rotor actions. That's how all actions actually work. The most important thing is to add the output of the text action so that it gets printed. In more technical terms, what the actions return and process are magic variables. Swipe down until you hear "Edit, message (The rest is the current text inside the message field)". Then Double-Tap. Make sure the cursor is at the end of the text field and delete all text. Now, it's getting messy, soo sad that Apple does not seem to have interest to optimize this experience for VoiceOver users. Find the buttons above the keyboard and the text suggestions (if you have enabled them). Find "Text, button" there and double-tap it. Now, you've added the magic variable to the show alert action. If that's all done, you can execute the shortcut by double-tapping "Run shortcut" at the bottom of the screen. If the keyboard covers the bottom, focus on the dictate button (either at the bottom right of the keyboard or left besides the space key) and make a circle gesture with two fingers (go back gesture).

What you have to keep in mind

If you want to experiment further, keep a few things in mind:

• Shortcuts run from top to bottom. Therefore, actions are processed from the first one to the last one. You can't change this, sou you need to think of how to actually group actions together in order to get the desired result.
• Each action processes input and produces output of a specific type. To find out which types are accepted as input and what will be output, double-tap on an action when you search for actions.
• Most actions assign the output of the action above as its input. In the given example, this was not the case, but usually it is (especially when there are no text fields or other message fields). If you don't want the automatically assigned input parameter, you can change it with rotor actions.
• To assign output of other actions to an action's text field, you use magic variables.

So, Shortcuts gives the ability to create simple workflows up to more complex applets. And the bst is, you can use those with Siri after you've created them by saying the Shortcut's title. For example, I created a Mastodon client for Siri with Shortcuts, enabling posting with one Siri command ("Post to Mastodon"). In the background, the Mastodon API was used for this. Or, when ChatGPT has not had its native iOS app, I used Shortcuts to connect the capabilities to Siri via OpenAI's API.

If you have further questions, feel free to ask.

I created a number of shortcuts several years ago using Voiceover to put the shortcuts together.

Although it was tricky the first time and a bit awkward using Voiceover gestures on the iPhone, it was doable.

Every year a new version of iOS came out some of the shortcuts seemed to get totally broken, or broken temporarily. They had all worked fine before updating.

Fortunately, using Voiceover gestures, I was able to fix the shortcuts that broke.

Since iOS 17 however, I have not been able to use Voiceover to fix my broken shortcuts. Using Voiceover seems to be exceedingly dificult when modifying built in actions. Would be good if Apple had some documentation about how to use Voiceover to edit shortcuts, because it certainly isn't obvious, and some actions do not seem to have the expected result.

So, for the time being, until the Shortcuts app has become more accessible with Voiceover or there are some good demos, I'm giving up.

Too bad, because this can be a powerful and useful feature.

--Pete

Yes, Shortcuts has become worse over the past years. However, actions themselves behave consistent for me. If VoiceOver focus is set on an action's name, you can single-tap with three fingers to hear the exact name. If you double-tap on the options pop-up menu, you'll get further information about the action.
What gets indeed more problematic is the fact that editing action's parameters is not very pleasant as a VoiceOver user. For example, editing alert messages results in not hearing what text has been deleted (at least for me). Moving actions is horrible. Navigating through actions is a terrible experience because nothing is grouped. Until iOS 15, the Shortcut editor was very clean and easy to navigate using VoiceOver because every action was exactly one Accessibility Element.

Darcy Burnard recorded a 10-part series on understanding and using shortcuts for the ACB Community podcast early last year. You can find the series by searching for "ACB Community podcast" in your preferred podcast app or by visiting https://acb-community.pinecast.co

The first episode in the series was published on January 23, 2023. As they have many episodes, you will need to scroll back a long way through their feed to find it. Here's the link to the first episode: https://acb-community.pinecast.co/episode/c357a624/20230123-understanding-shortcuts-on-ios-devices

First, editing parameters in Shortcuts. You're right, if you're editing the prompt in an ask for input action, for example, VO doesn't read what you're doing. You can see what you're deleting if you go back up and read the action, but I've often found just deleting the whole thing and retyping it is easier unless it's something really simple.

Things like the text action though do work, so sometimes you can use that and just insert a variable. The only thing about the text action is that, if you put a magic variable as the first character, double tapping to edit it will just edit that variable instead of the text field. I usually try to put a space or something at the beginning while I'm doing a lot of editing.

As for moving, there are a couple of ways. swiping on the options button gives you "move up" and "move down" commands. They're pretty good if you're just moving the action around a little bit. The other way is to copy the action, delete it, go to where you want it and then paste. You *can* drag and drop if you need to, for example adding an action in the in the middle of a shortcut, but you'll probably have to use move up and move down to position it properly, since you can't here where it's being dropped.

Honestly, small Shortcuts and using the run shortcuts action to call them is really helpful these days, although apparently that's even true for sighted users, since it's pretty broken for them too.

Honestly, I've found it's still usable and useful - I've done a bunch of Shortcuts work in iOS 17. You've just got to be a little bit patient and think a bit outside the box. Admittedly, I'm using an iPad for all this, not a phone, so it's possible that makes it easier.