Navigating Instagram reels with VoiceOver broken?

By gamesmaster, 2 May, 2025

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Since a couple updates ago, swiping on Instagram reels with voiceover doesn’t work.
I am unable to share, like, or view comments with flicking. Not sure if this is a bug or if there’s another way of doing it now?

Options

Comments

By Siddarth B Mahajan on Saturday, May 3, 2025 - 12:02

it has some bug

By Rêzan Salih Îbo on Saturday, May 3, 2025 - 17:16

Hi guys!
I have the same problem for long time.

By TheBlindGuy07 on Sunday, May 4, 2025 - 03:01

Confirm.

By Kevin Shaw on Sunday, May 4, 2025 - 19:23

confirmed, although there are times I do have access to the Like and Share buttons, so it's inconsistent.
When I get stuck between swiping between 2 reels, I'll tap the tab bar at the bottom and then swipe left. This seems to advance to the next reel and swiping with 3 fingers works again for a while. If there's a way to report this to Meta, please comment.

By InfoRover on Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 14:24

This is still a problem. Pretty poor on Meta's part but hey, what do we expect at this point.
I've emailed:
accessibility@meta.com
If enough of us email, perhaps one day they'll get around to fixing it.
I'm sick of companies not taking accessibility seriously. If this were a problem for sighted users, it'd be fixed in a day. It's seriously vile.
Anyway, I'll get off my soap box now.

By Winter Roses on Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 17:38

I haven’t noticed the problem you’re talking about much myself, but I think I did run into it a couple times back when I used Instagram Reels. Unfortunately, since Instagram is such a heavily visual platform, I don’t think you’re going to find a lot of blind individuals willing to take this task on. You’ve already reported it multiple times, and honestly, I don’t know what good it’s going to do. At the end of the day, we’re blind, and the majority of Instagram’s user base isn’t. If this was happening to the majority, yeah, sure, they’d fix it right away. But since we’re the minority group on the platform, I don’t know how much weight it’s going to carry.

For whatever it’s worth, I’ll check it out and I’ll drop them an email later. It is what it is—it’s social media. It’s not banking, transportation, infrastructure, or government services, so it’s always going to be harder to convince people it’s a priority. But I’ll still send them a message. I can’t promise it’s going to change anything, but at least the concern will be on record.

By mahmood on Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 18:00

Hello. I switched from Android to iOS 3 months ago. Yes, unfortunately, there's a problem, and nothing can be done in Instagram Reels except with screen recognition. Even if we select 'Create' from the bottom tabs, if VoiceOver is on, the screen goes blank! I informed them through feedback, and I hope it gets resolved.

By Enes Deniz on Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 18:03

I still doubt the bug reports sent to that address are taken seriously but I will at least be able to reach out to a genuine human support team and report the problems I encounter in other apps from Meta, including WhatsApp. I'm tired of the useless WhatsApp bot!

By fatih on Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 19:13

I sent them an email about this issue and I had sent a report by shaking the device when on the reels tab a long time ago, but it didn't get fixed of course.

By Saj on Friday, August 29, 2025 - 11:03

Yeah this also applies to when you’re trying to share a post or photos. I guess you could try screen recognition, when I open the app if I found the ad button I double tap that with the screen recognition turned on and it seems to work. Try that with the reels and see if that makes any difference probably won’t but it’s worth a shot.