Facebook Messenger issue

This is a bug with how messenger reports things to VoiceOver. They fixed it once before a while back but it appears they've broken it again and have yet to fix it back. Also the fact that they removed the active people tab just to replace it with a redundant Meta AI tab when you could just access it from your chats is stupid. I wish they'd add the active tab back at least. The message vomit bug isn't so bad just quickly go to the home screen and back into the app as a workaround but there's no way to get around a missing important part of the app.

Facebook has completely stopped caring about accessibility. This problem in Messenger has been going on for over a month now. In the Facebook app:

VoiceOver does not read link previews.
VoiceOver does not provide access to sections on other users' profiles for managing connections.
After entering a post, the tabs at the bottom disappear.
When writing a comment, after selecting line navigation on the rotor, the navigation does not work.

Running into this as well. It's a Meta issue that they seem to keep fixing, then breaking a while later.
One thing that somewhat works for the redundant speaking of messages is to mute VoiceOver before entering a conversation or before you press send on a message, then unmuting it after performing the given action.

The Messenger issue is just one in a catalogue of major accessibility issues, about which nothing seems to be done. We all need to mobilise to Contact Meta Accessibility. I have written to them about the issues with the Facebook app, but not this particular issue as it does at least seem to get fixed regularly.

Good news about Facebook. The latest update fixed the unlabeled buttons.
Hopefully Messenger’s chat bug will be fixed soon as well.

I know nothing about coding and programming, but I guess this issue happens is partly attributable to some of the choices Voice Over made too.
It is extremely weird to me that when a third-party app reports a very long string of accessibility information to Voice Over, the user cannot really do anything meaningful to interrupt the announcement / saying aloud of that long string. Why does that have to be the case, I wonder? User's input from physical keyboard, braille device or the touch screen should have the highest priority to interrupt and/or control Voice Over, and the correct behaviour for Voice Over in this case, I believe, is to stop reading whatever being reported, and continue responding to the user gestures/commands.
This weird behaviour choice makes it difficult to use some other apps too, especially when you try to do so at a relatively faster pace. For example, when I try to populate data on a Google sheet I know the layout well, and so do not need to hear the cell position that carefully, Voice Over will also be hung frozen exactly like the way it is on Messenger. Fortunately strings Google Sheets sends are short, so I wouldn't have to wait very long each time, but it does happen very often, and does make it feel rather sluggish and inconvenient to use. Oh last thing to note, the behaviour I described with Google Sheets is with Voice Over on my Mac.

The fact that the Messenger app needs constant updates is an indication of poor engineering. Meta is telling us that they can't get it right, that sending text messages between users in the closed Facebook ecosystem is some kind of insurmountable coding challenge. It's sad. This is the kind of simple, basic application that should have been written once with no need for updates.

This announcement bug seems to be solved since 2-3 weeks now. Time will tell how long it will stay like that.

So, my app seems to have been fixed but in iOs 18, there's a new rotor option/command toggle for reading out live, realtime events which can occur on websites or apps.
This could be a potential workaround if you're still experiencing this.