iPhone mirroring now working with voiceover on latest developer betas on iPhone and mac

Hi,
That's amazing news. Does this mean that SharePlay is now working with VoiceOver as well? Can anyone test this?

With the new releases, you should be able to control other people's devices over SharePlay in a FaceTime call, for example. Would be nice if that also works.

Hi, that's awesome! is notification sounds coming through on iPhone mirroring? example, whenever you receive a message on either the native messages app or whatsapp?

So the next developer beta is the 15.1 beta 5 or something like that right?

Developer beta 5 (public beta 2) is the most current seed as of the time of this writing.

These features should have been accessible on day One! From my limited testing, the SharePlay remote screen control feature is also completely inaccessible. You can start a session, but there's no way to know what's going on. Every time Apple does something wonderful like enhanced Braille Screen Input or the VoiceOver tutorial, they drop the ball in other areas like this. I don't understand.

I ran the public betas until the major releases came out, then turned them off, but this sounds exciting. I think I will really really like being able to screen mirror. Would also be pretty sweet if they let us put shortcuts to the iPhone apps we plan on using most right on our docks, so when we want to get to one of those fast, it would fire up iPhone mirroring and bring us right in to that app.
Even if they don't do that, I think this could be neat.

I saw this in my list of apps, and I opened it to have a look around. It actually looks pretty accessible on its own. What is the difference between this, Hand-off, and that catalyst project which makes iOS apps available on the Mac and vice versa? In any case this looks interesting and I think I can see some usage for it. I believe I've only tried out one iOS app on the Mac, that being Weather Gods. It was pretty sluggish on my M1 MBA, but I think everyone knows how this app performs on iOS.

So, the thing is, not all devs release the iOS version to also run on Mac OS. Can they? Yes, it only requires a button press to make it be able to install on Mac OS, but for whatever reason, a lot of people don't.
So Handoff works with apps where there is a version available for both the mac and iPhone, allowing you to pick up a task on a different device, say you started to look something up on your phone, you can then resume with that tab on the iPad or Mac.
With the iPhone screen mirroring, you are technically running everything from your phone, but getting audio and visuals from your phone, and of course using either your keyboard or trackpad to move around. No idea what this will do for battery life. It hasn't worked with Voiceover until now. It'll be cool to see how well it does work once released to the public in the stable release.

I'd love to have the google docs app, or even better the instagram app as last time I tried the dm are not accessible on web with any screen reader

Not gunna lie, at least they're doing something about all this now but I agree with one of the previous posters above, these features should have been accessible from day one or at least, public release. People have been beta testing for months and I be hearing reports were sent about all of this when I've heard reports about this not being accessible and upon first public release. Yet, while they did a lot of work with voiceover of which, I'm quite grateful for, their should be no excuse when one of apple's main features aren't accessible right out the gate when public releases comes around. This all should have been hammmered out upon beta! I quite do not understand of why apple likes to talk the talk but not walk the walk as it were. I'd like to wonder what it would take for us to get a jobat apple's accessibility team because clearly, people who are working their right now ain't doing their jobs. Things started going down hill once Tim took office and I for one would love another person like Steave Jobs to take the torch and bring apple back to what they were back in the day. But hey, I can dream can't I? Never the less, glad this is now becoming a reallity even if I don't have one of the newer macs that can run this latest OS.

It's probably a lot of software development work to transfer the accessibility API data over the network from iPhone to Mac, so I'm not surprised that it didn't make the initial release. This is very different from making an application accessible. You need mechanisms to serialize the data, transfer them, and then make them available to VoiceOver on the Mac side. Commands issued on the Mac need to be applied on the iPhone.

I would rather they take a little to get it right. if they released it early and it had bugs people would complain. They are ihn a no win situation.

yes this should have bin accessible from day one, now i don't know how bad it was but if you cant get VO to come through the computer speakers just use the Iphone speakers so we have at least some way of useing it wi'll making it so vo comes through the computer speakers

I also agree. They should've added Accessibility support since day one. I'm glad that Apple has added support for this. Hoping in the future continued Accessibility improvements are made. again, any bugs you come accross, be sure to report it for future beta builds.

This is not like say, the accessibility of an app, this one is more complex. Heck, for all we know, from day 1, they could've been working on accessibility for it. Another example? Apple intelligence. That, acording to some of you, should also have come at the very least, at on the public release; its still not out, because these things are more complex and take more time to get working than say, the accessibility of an app. You have to see the bigger picture here, not just the, oh it’s not out on day 1 but it should've been... if it was? With all the amount of bugs people in general had to be reporting? This would've been lost amongst all the other bugs. I, for one don't mind the wait. Also, keep in mind, sighted people where testing this as well, which would've added to the noise, so to speak and made things far more complicated for apple, as they'd had to work on 2 fronts, accessibility and the sighted parts of this. And if the sighted parts of this, are showing bugs, as an example? A bit disappointing to see the lack of patience of some here, bug I digress. As said though, these things take a while, and its beeing made accessible in the end, so why complain if, oh, its not in the timeframe I wanted it in! as someone said its a lose lose here with some of you.

Like I said they were in a no win situation here. If they released it and it were full of bugs those same people would complain about it. They hold it back to make sure it is ready and people are still critical of them. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.

Yeah sometimes attitudes like some of what we see here just... Makes me ashamed of the blind comunity in general and to be part of it, hense my not associating with it as much as I could, to be completely frank. I mean, its still being made accessible in the end so... Why complain in the first place? Now. If it wasn't going to be made accessible at all? Totally justified, and I'd add my voice to the rest but, complaining just because oh why it’s not beeing delivered on day one! why! Again, one should look at the bigger picture here. I mean, interesting how some are complaining about this not coming since day one or at release and yet... The same lens isn't applied to say, apple intelligence; which at the end of the day; same story really. Anyway I digress. Tbh we've seen this happen in the passed, I.e, I believe it was in the earlier moddles of the apple watch, voiceover didn't work at first, it took a while for it to arrive, something like that anyway.
Not sure if i'll try it out now or just wait for the public version for this to come out but, I'm glad to see this is getting accessibility as well.

I could agree with those frustrated if it were iOS 18.2 or 18.3 or 18.4 and it weren't accessible but to me they are making sure it is polished. You also need to keep in mind they have to make sure major bugs that could've impacted people running 18.0 were fixed first. In a perfect world sure it would've worked from day one. But that isn't the case. It is working and most likely will be in 18.1 so not a huge deal.

It's a Multi-Trillian dollar company. It can very well afford to employ an army of accessibility specialist and get everything sorted on time. The only reason they are not doing it is that we have normalized having bugs and accessibility issues in initial releases of softwares. May be a $500 phone company can do that, but I expect everything to be working in perfect working condition, without any accessibility issues for a thousand dollar phone.

If you expect everything to be perfect you need to get realistic!! No software is never going to be bug free anywhere.

While we can't know for sure, it's conceivable that feedback and pressure from users to make iPhone Mirroring accessible contributed to positive movement in the 15.1 beta cycle. Especially with accessibility, I get the sense that Apple, for better or worse, makes the most significant progress in response to user observations and criticism, like the kind often featured on this website.

I think the discussion about iPhone mirroring not being accessible with VoiceOver in the initial macOS 15.0 release overlooks some important points. While some users expected this feature to be fully accessible from the start, I don’t believe that’s a completely fair expectation.

First, iPhone mirroring is not just a simple app—it involves transferring everything on the iPhone’s display to another device, such as a Mac, and making all that content interact smoothly with VoiceOver. This is technically complex, and Apple has to ensure not only the display transfer but also that VoiceOver’s accessibility layers work seamlessly with the mirrored content.

To be fair, Apple has resolved many bugs that users had been reporting for a long time. Of course, other issues have been introduced, like the inaccessibility of the recovery partition in French, which is frustrating. But it’s important to remember that they can’t fix everything at once—they have to prioritize.

While I personally would have loved for iPhone mirroring to be accessible with VoiceOver right from the start, and I agree that it’s a shame it wasn’t, I also think it’s understandable. Apple has made accessibility a priority and continues to improve, so I expect future updates will address this. Unfortunately, for me, since I’m in Europe, the feature isn’t compatible, so I won’t be able to test it myself.

The thing is that macos has so many voiceover bugs here and there that this one not being accessible in the beta cycle made people less tollerent than usual, although as long as they are working on it it's the least of my problem, and macos 15 aside some usual old bugs has already patched quite a lot. Voiceover shortcuts is actually a quality of life update for us in terms of keyboard ergonomy for once when you really start leveraging it. Now I also wish that the screen share remote control also becomes accessible which will eat market share for RIM :)
I am personally less tollerent with macos voiceover bugs than ios, because mac is just so cluncky and convoluted to use. I think SNR has seen the tollerence limit of many here and outside applevis, and for that only I can perfectly understand the frustration I also tend to share to an extent.

That’s that bug where vo freezes and you can’t do anything for a wile right? Sorry I never used a Mack so I am not sure what it fully is

I think it could have been done better, others may choose to think otherwise.
This was a flagship feature in this release, and the fact that it was inaccessible would have been noted by Quality Assurance teams. Someone somewhere said that's okay, let's ship it, we will figure out accessibility later. That's not a bug, it's a prioritization issue.
All I am saying is that that's not acceptable. Shipping Feature first and accessibility later shouldn't be the common practice. That's how we end up with no accessibility experts on the development teams, and the feedback cycle.
Please! please! demand accessibility from the start. We all know it's importance!

I see both sides to this however with that being said, sorry but gotta agree here. There is better ways of handeling this. Either wait until things are ready for release and ship on a later version if things are not working right or fix things from the start. The mirroring feature could have honest to god waited until it was accessible. I'm not buying that this is a bug at all, rather buying that accessibility team dropped the ball on this one. Sorry not sorry. Here's my take. I would have been less frustrated about all of this if apple would have treeted mac OS accessibility the same as they're treeting IOS, but no. The fact that it's taking them this long to fix major, serious, long standing bugs really don't sit right. It's why I'm not even thinking about either getting a new mac or upgrading. I'll bet ya money, if serious features weren't working right for sighted people, apple would have no issues fixing them at all and they'd get the ball wolling. We've seen this time and time again yet while we are treated like second class. Look, I'm not expecting an OS nor screen readers to be totally free of bugs, but there's got to be some countabillity here and this ain't it. apple needs to prioritize accessibility and as of right now, they ain't walkin' the walk. Only talkin' the talk.

There's a common argument in the blind community that since Apple is a trillion-dollar company, they should be able to hire as many software developers and accessibility testers as needed to fix all the bugs quickly. But that's not how software development works.

In fact, adding more developers to a project that’s already late usually makes it take even longer. The more people working on a project, the more they have to coordinate with each other. This extra coordination often leads to mistakes, delays, and people getting in each other’s way.

Also, adding more people only helps if the work can be split up easily. For example, 50 people baking 50 pizzas with 50 ovens will finish faster than 50 people trying to bake 50 pizzas with just 10 ovens.

Large software projects are usually very hard to divide up, and having more people often means spending even more time planning and organizing. On top of that, I imagine Apple's iOS and macOS accessibility teams are separate, so they have to coordinate between teams, making things even harder. Just throwing money at the problem won’t make it go faster—in fact, it might slow it down.

I just updated to MacOS 15.1 beta 5, and it's awesome! I have my iphone connected, and I'm able to hear all notification sounds coming through my mac. one thing is that you cannot switch pages unlike you could in iOS. Maybe it'll be fixed soon in future builds. nevertheless, apple has done a splended job in supporting iPhone mirroring with VoiceOver.

For me, I've had success changing Home Screen pages via iPhone Mirroring by focusing on the picker and choosing to scroll left or right from the actions menu.

it works! I tested the third party apps like gmail and clubhouse. I can even listen to the audio from a clubhouse room from my macs internal speakers..

But yes! Thank you Apple! If this is a the preview of what to come next I'm happy Apple is actively working on it. I was able to access the settings app, and best than all, the journaling app that in my humble opinion should've been for all platform and not just iphone. In Safari you can access the address bar but no the page itself yet. Date selector doesn't seem to work in a third party app but they are standard selecter we can have in a webview for date of birth, one for months, days and years at the bottom of the screen? I'll try with actions. But yeah! It's coming.

In very short we seem to have the worst combination possible ever of iphone voiceover and mac voiceover, as both navigation models conflict with each other in pretty much every step.
Okay it's already very useful as I can now chat peacefully on instagram DMs thanks to this, so good job apple. But if they keep this and only make incremental bug corrections I fear that this feature will be the single most hated one by blind people.
Basically we have to invoke the action menu with vo shift cmd space to scroll pages, text editing is very weird as vo end and vo home work but vo up and down don't, and you can't use single arrow keys to navigate text, or to navigate whatsoever. Focus loss is a huge bug as we can be stuck in the status bar and we can only wait to hopefully be back in the app soon (5-15s). I am on the latest betas. It is not just a keyboard emulation passed to the iphone and voiceover speech and sound passed back to mac with speech as they could have totally done liek what numa solutions do with nvda addon and rim, rather all the ui is passed to mac voiceover, with its rotor and navigation model which is unadapted for touch. I seriously wonder whether they test with blind users or just get their accessibility implementation done as an mvp here? Google docs is still better on the mac in web than the app, to give you an idea.
Anyways. I'll keep reporting and hopefully we see improvements in the stable releases, but if the .1 releases are to be public soon then those who haven't tested in the beta beware that it is not what we were probably imagining it will be.

allows to do more or less that with a better experience, just have to turn voiceover off :)

As someone who works in software development field in a large company, I purely see accessibility as a prioritization problem. Prioritize it enough, and you have everything accessible going. Neglect it, or, allow it to be neglected, and quickly it falls back in to shambles. And yes, Money does matter. Unless those project/product managers don't get budgets to have accessibility resources in their teams, things aren't happening the accessible way. You can't expect a central accessibility team going after each new feature, and fixing accessibility after the rollout. Dedicated resources in each team brings decentralization, delegation, and better accountability.
Also, Probably off-topic, but given the feature at hand, warrants a comment or brief discussion.
Anyone tried Microsoft's Phone link feature? I believe on Samsung and Pixel phones, it also allows you to miror screens, or, something called App Streaming. You can actually have a shortcut in your laptop opening a specific app directly on your autherized phone. Not sure how accessible that one is.
Motorola Edge series phones have Motorola Smart connect, which is kind of similar, and appears to be accessible with Talkback.
Very sure Apple's implementation would be the best though. But again, you are paying for that, so, expected.

I use Phone Link pretty much daily. It does seem to have more functionality with Android-based phones, however. As I have an iPhone, I am simply limited to text, phone call, and notification sharing between my iPhone and my HP laptop. Oh, and it also lets me know my battery percentage as well, which is kinda cool.
I find Phone Link to be quite a useful tool, and I’m glad to have access to it. Of course, Android users pretty much get their own version of screen mirroring through Phone Link. I know it could be done on an iPhone as well, but I doubt Apple will allow it, since they have their own mirroring thing that they are working on for Mac based computers. 🤷‍♂️

(I did feedback most of it) It's basically a horrible mix between android, and a mac like ios... The app switcher is horrible currently with voiceover as scrolling makes VO read all the app in a weird order. Use trackpad whenever you can to select element it's easier. The problem though that you better assign a trackpad gesture to invoke the action menu unless there's one by default I'm unaware of, plus voiceover being voiceover as far as I know you can only assign a modifier key + trackpad gesture so forced to use two hands. Basically the biggest issue is that for some apps like whatsapp the message and the user name (in chat list or in a discussion itself) are in the reversed order. In the chat list the action menu is complete with all the actions of ios whatsapp, but in a discussion it isn't so for copy you ahve to action menu --> press (or show more/open menu... somethings along those lines) and then try to find the buttons copy and etc somewhere at the bottom of the interface. And every now and then you must scroll with the trackpad to get more elements in ascending or or descending and explore by touch after.
Text navigation couldn't be messier than it's now, you have to rotor through it, sometimes you must re interact with the edit field... You can do vo home and end in the text, vo left and right, and vo shift left and right, but not vo up and down, for this you have, not to navigate by line with the rotor as this doesn't seem to work but with paragraph. Arrow keys alone will make iPhone voiceover move randomly on the lock screen. The selection with vo enter works relatively well though but on the us keyboard for whatever reason shift slash only type / and not ? and cmd v and the other command + letter key don't do anything as far as I can tell.
Sometimes focus is lost and you are stuck in the iPhone status bar on iPhone mirroring app and I haven't really found another way other than home screen or app switcher and go back into the app and hope it works again, or just wait, and hope the same thing.
The adjust option in the rotor doesn't work and I think this script is fundamentally broken in voiceover itself as it doesn't seem to work anywhere. To scroll you either use trackpad or action menu and scroll in any direction the interface let you to.
I haven't tried safari on the latest betas but as of ios 18.1 beta 5 and the latest macos 15.1 beta at the time the web content itself wasn't accessible and you could only access the address bar and the 5 buttons at the bottom (back to tabs).
So yeah, I understand that it's a beta, but 1 we blind user are already too late and are just starting to get access to it for the 5-10 people in the world who specifically have a mac and iPhone compatible and actively try iPhone mirroring, and 2 this shows again how apple accessibility team is fragmented between ios and macos.

So, I'm on the latest betas of both operating systems, but voiceover doesn't seem to be speaking through the mac itself.
From what I gathered in this post it was, but I could be mistaken?

I see now. it lets you navigate the app using the mac itself, not a stream from voicever on the phone.

Which is in my opinion the worst implementation possible at least with current results.

It seems a bit worst on the 7th beta of 15.1 and the latest beta of ios 18.1. On instagram for example in the caht list voicoever would randomly start re reading interface from the beginning and the only way to make sure youère on the right element is to use trackpad. Plus VO seems to lose focus more as in several apps it would only say grouped with nothing while with vo shift l we can clearly see that the interface is actually still there. Like when you go into messenger and in a conversation voiceover won't see anything in the discussion but it's still displaied on the screen.

I love it, it just works, there was a problem where sound from my phone was super choppy and unusable but I changed a setting in phone link and everything works fine now