Well, I ended up upgrading to an iPhone 18 Pro Max, and got it setup today. Overall, things are working well. However, I'm having one very annoying, and rather major VoiceOver bug I have no idea how to fix.
When VoiceOver is on, I can't seem to touch the top part of my screen, and get any response. If I touch the top row of icons on the home screen, or anything on the top status bar, VO doesn't read anything. In fact, if something else lower on the screen has focus, trying to tap, or drag my finger around the screen seems to often do an accidental double tap.
I also cannot seem to drag my finger down to access the control center or notification center. Sometimes it seems to scroll left one Home screen, or open the app switcher instead.
I am low vision, and if I turn VO off, the full screen works beautifully. I can tap anywhere on the screen, drag down from the upper left or right to open control center or notification center, and everything seems to work perfectly. When VO is on though, I can't seem to access anything on the first row or higher on my Home screen, or about that high when in any app.
If I drag my finger from a lower part of the screen to those areas, VO will sometimes read them though. I can also tap somewhere lower on the screen and swipe left to access the top row of Home icons.
It's like VO can't access or see the top area of the screen. I have tried resetting VO settings, restarting the phone, looking around VO settings, and I even broke down and just installed IOS 27.2 beta hoping it might fix things. Nope...
Has anyone else had this problem? It doesn't seem to be a hardware problem because I can use my phone fine without VO on. And IOS 27 works fine on my iPhone 16 Pro Max. It's like something on the 18 Pro Max is working differently, and causing VO to act screwy.
I even called Apple Accessibility this evening, and let them know. They didn't seem to know anything either, but said they would pass my feedback along. I'm hoping someone has a fix here.
Thanks.
Comments
Very strange, possibly reset our settings?
Hey, that’s very strange. Have you tried resetting all settings? Look I know that’s a pain because that means you’re gonna have to reconfigure everything but it may sell this you’re having. I’m surprised that the resetting voiceover settings didn’t fix any of this though. That would’ve been my first thing to have you try but it says you already did that so right next to guess. She wants to be definitely various specifically voiceover issue. But that might be my next guess or maybe something got really somehow older. I don’t know it installing the operating system itself. Did you transfer premier 16 or did you set up as a new phone? I mean, that would literally be something that I would say is the last resort if you’re setting up as a new phone something may have gotten corrupted within your updating every year. I don’t know. I hope one of these things can possibly help. I’m glad that this is getting passed on to Apple Accessibility though because they definitely need to look into this.
Have you used Siri?
It might be you've used Siri and not dismissed it. It's got a little window at the top. If you do a swipe up it should get rid of it. I think, visually, things like alarms and siri compress the lower part of the screen to make space.
Interesting didn’t know
That’s interesting, Oliver. I did not know that. I learned something new today.
Good News
Well, I don't know what solved it, but things seem to be working great now. At first, upgrading to IOS 27.2 beta didn't seem to fix things. Here's what I think happened.
Partly, I think things were just acting a bit screwy during initial setup, downloading everything from iCloud, and whatever phones do when you first get them, and there's a lot of background stuff going on. Siri is still optimizing, which I know takes forever, especially when you have as many apps on your phone as I do...
The other major contributing factor, i think, is that I now have a phone case. I kind of decided to order the phone at the last minute, so I had to wait an extra day to get a case from Amazon. This is important, because these modern phones have such little bezels, pretty much none, that I think I was getting a lot of problems with the palm rejection feature when trying to do gestures. Somr part of my hand or fingers were slightly touching somewhere else on the screen, which is why VoiceOver wouldn't work properly, and why I would sometimes even accidently get accidental taps or swipes with VO off.
I've had my case on since mid-yesterday afternoon, and the phone's been working like a dream ever since. This thing is fast too... And the battery life seems pretty insane so far. I purposely had either audio, video, going pretty much constantly for the first day, sometimes playing a simple visual game while watching or listening. I took and made a couple of calls, used my magnifier app, and did some other stuff too, and I went from about 8:30 PM to about 4:30 PM the next day, and still had 20 percent.
I think my problem thankfully is solved, which is good, because I was worried there for a bit. Now to finish trying to remember all my damn usernames and passwords... Thank God for iCloud Keychain...