The Accessibility Bugs in iOS 9: From Serious To Minor

1. On both my iPhone 5 and iPad 4, the upgrade dramatically lowered my screen brightness. I normally keep it set quite bright, 80% or 90%. On my iPhone 5, the upgrade set the brightness to 32%, and on my iPad, the upgrade set it to 15%. This is problematic for low vision users.

2. My iPad 4 is normally locked into landscape orientation. The upgrade seems to assume portrait orientation. All of the post-update setup stuff is presented in portrait. In the initial "Hello" screen, presented visually in portrait, I had to swipe DOWN with 3 fingers to initiate the setup, as if the iPad were actually in landscape. Very confusing.

Overall, some long-standing issues I've been tracking were finally resolved. The new iOS 9 is a little clunky and will take some getting used to, but overall it is a much better release than the initial iOS 8, and contains many nice new features like the new text selection. I like it.

I use the Samantha US English enhanced voice for VoiceOver.

Occasionally, it seems to switch over to a more "hoarse" or sultry voice, as if Samantha has just enjoyed a cigarette.

As one example, when I enter the Notes app and tap the edit area, VO reads "system font regular, 21 point..." etc., all in this more hoarse version. Just that particular piece of content. And when it's done reading it, VO reverts back to using its normal Samantha voice.

Has anyone else seen this? Is it a bug or feature? JAWS, for example, uses voice changes to denote specific types of content being read.

This is on an iPhone 5.

After updating to iOS 9 I cannot hear people when I call them or when they call me. They also cannot hear me, if I put speakerphone on then audio comes through but it is all jumbled and incoherent.

Check under settings, general, accessibility, Voiceover, to make sure that the pitch change is turned off. That's the only thing I can think of that might cause the description that you are thinking about. Hope this helps.

I have not yet updated as yet, but a friend has. He is not happy with the upgrade. Is it possible to rollback to IOS 8.4? If so, I would appreciate either a link to a "how to" or some specific instructions.
Thanks for any help or suggestions.

I received a call within an hour of updating to IOS 9. Voiceover didn't crash as I expected from reading previous crash warnings but after hanging up the call voiceover was stuck in it's in call voice. While this is better than it used to be it's still not what we want. Turning voiceover off and on again didn't fix it. In the end I had to turn the whole phone off and on again! That's a pain! This happened to anyone else yet? For the sake of bug testing I got my partner to call me and after hanging up voiceover again stayed in the in call voice, however after I called her than hung up voiceover reverted... Bizarre?

1 YEAR BIBLE. when I awoke this morning to read my daily passages it was stuck on yesterdays pasages. After fooling around for sometime to attempt to correct, I deleted the app. and re-installed it and now it works as it is suppose to.

Hello Everyone,

Since upgrading to iOS 9, I have been experiencing a situation where recording of audio messages is unreliable. After the Record button has been double tapped and held, the message has been verbally recorded and the button has been released, sometimes, no message is sent, even though the recording length is shown.

I realize this comment is just a quick summarization of the bug. Has anyone else experienced this one, yet?

I installed iOS 9 on my iPad Mini. I am finding the rotor much tougher to operate. Finnicky, I guess, would be the word. A lot of left and right turning in order to cycle through the options. Also, I notice no improvement in VO responsiveness on my system as some had suggested there would be, and a rather significant lag when using the Siri female voice as some have mentioned on here. Performance in Safari is so sluggish as to render the browser impractical to use. All of these things may be specific to my device and user case. Nevertheless, overall I am disappointed that yet again we're here talking about dozens of silly bugs instead of enjoying new features on initial public release day. Bummer.

I, too, have found this to be a problem; and what's worse, you often don't know whether the message was sent or not.

When I first started working with this (after iOS 9 was installed) I also had a problem with the audio quality of the recording. Since then, however, that particular problem seems to have sorted itself out.

I like the siri voices, but I agree they do tend to mispronounce things incorrectly and you have to listen carefully and sometimes swipe down letter by letter or word to figure it out. As far as Samantha goes, yes I do think somewhere between 8.4 and 9.0 she must of gotten so stress she had to take on smoking. I wonder if Apple is using an updated version of vocalizer for ios9? As far as vibration patterns go yes I've noticed this as well but only when the phone is muted.

I am using an iphone 6 and just upgraded this morning. Most of the OS is working fine except when I try and use Siri, both the tone to let me know she is active and her responses are very quiet. If I have the bluetooth headset active, the sound switches to the speaker and is still really quiet.
Anyone else have this or a setting change that fixes it?
I'm going to let Apple know.

Is it just me, or does the operating system download 2 copies of the Siri voices? I think 1 is for system TTS like VoiceOver and speak screen while the other one is for Siri itself. Is this a bug or am I mistaken? I am going to report this to Apple and see if it is indeed a bug. If it is, it should be resolved because I don't need 2 copies of the same voice data on my phone. I have a 16 GB 5S.

Regarding the concern in the Messages app, there is more to that bug than just recording an audio message. When using the iOS Braille onscreen keyboard with Voice Over's focus on a text field and Composing/replying to a message, one of several items might happen. These include:

• You hear the ding that an audio message is being recorded, and the Braille onscreen keyboard fails to work initially
• The Braille onscreen keyboard just completely fails to work, even if you calibrate positions or use explore mode

I am linking these two together since its interesting that the audio messaging ding sometimes sounds off and you are experiencing issues recording audio messages.

Hi guys. I hope absolutely everyone reporting these bugs here will write to accessibility@apple.com and report your findings. if possible, the best way to report the bugs is to do it like this....

first, explain what the bug is. Next, if you can, give the exact steps you took which caused the problem to occur. Also, be sure to tell them if the problem is reproducible, and if it is, if it happens only some of the time, or every single time you take those steps. This will help the accessibility teamto try and replicate the problem and then they can report the problems to the developers who will, hopefully, find a fix. Mostly for me, it's little nagging issues like sounds from 3rd party apps not always playing. What seems to solve the problem is to open the app in question, and that seems to solve it. I've had no stability issues apart from the one phone call I took yesterday, all the phone calls I've taken today have worked flawlessly. I hope these suggestions will help squash some of these bugs. If you really, truly want them solved, you need to let Apple know. It'd be nice if they could come here to visit, but they have lots to do, so email seems to be the best way of contacting them.

Have you tried using the volume buttons while siri is talking. That should increase the volume of SIRI.

Pressing the volume button made Siri slightly louder, but made the rest of VO much much louder.
I reported this to apple and after a few trouble shooting tests, we tried restarting the phone. Voila loud Siri.

When using Bluetooth to make call voiceover does not work. it happens not sometimes but all times when I make a call. After finishing the call Bluetooth disconnect and it goes to speaker. Is there away to fix this or do I need to wait for 9.1? I use Bluetooth all the times.

Typing feedback no longer works whether or not typing feedback is said to characters, words or characters & words, typing feedback is no longer given in any app: messaging, emails, notes et cetera s.

I haven't experienced the call answering issue on 5S and iOS 9.1. I think iOS 9.1 is actually faster than the 9.0, which is why I switched back after downgrading. Well, that and data loss that comes with downgrading.

I also don't experience the unlabeled button in the Proactive Search. I hear favorite contacts instead and can choose to call, text, etc. It's confusing because it's called Spotlight Search whether you swipe right or down with three fingers.

What I do experience is notification sounds not playing sometimes, which means I miss phone calls. Or else the sound will play but no notification shows on the lock screen. I do like that notification banners can easily be clicked with VO now and you go straight to the e-mail or whatever app sent the notice. But it's troubling to me to miss phone calls just because I don't hear the phone ringing.

Is this a feature or bug? The Siri voices don't sound like Siri at all.
Does any one know how to get Siri voices to sound like Siri?
Thanks

VoiceOver seems to have a tendency not to play certain effects in this version, but triple tapping the home button to disable and enable it generally resolves the problem. Hope that helps.

Hi, could someone elaborate further on bug 8? What actually happens when voiceover becomes unresponsive upon starting a voice memo? I use voice memos quite frequently. What I'm trying to say I guess, is the bug seriously so bad that one can't record without something happening to VO. As long as a memo can be recorded, I can live with the bug. Just need a bit more info on this one before I go ahead and update the phone.
Thanks in advance for any responses.

Overall, I am very happy with iOS 9 and like the new features.

Just a couple of irritating bugs for me. One is the instability of the rotor. I would set it to headings, only to find that it reverts to characters, particularly when going into an edit box.

I have also noticed that if you activate the clear text button in the app store for example, it doesn't always remove text that was previously in the edit box. This is using an iPad Mini 2.

Report it to ccessibility@apple.com and include a demo of what happens and screenshots if possible. the more of us that report this the better they will fix it for us beta testers.

hi. I don't know if it has been mentioned or not but I found an odd bug. I set my typing feed back to words and characters but sometimes voiceover doesn't speak neither the letters nor the words I write. this seems to happen randomly because I wasn't able to replicate the bug no matter what I tried. but sometimes it did that and I had to restart voice over in order for it to work properly again.

This happens when you send a message or email from with in an app. I have reported this since ios 7 by the way.

I've also noticed the bug when recording audio messages in the message app. Rather annoying it is. Hope it gets fixed in 9.1.

Hello. Below is an email I just sent to the Apple Accessibility Team. While waiting for them to work on the issues described below, does anyone know of any work-arounds? Thank you.
Dear Apple Accessibility team:

I am writing, firstly, to report some bugs in VoiceOver’s Braille features when accessed using the HIMS Braille Edge 40 refreshable Braille display with my iPhone 5s, as follows:

1. When using the BardMobile app from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped to read their downloadable Braille books, some of the Braille short cut keys in the BardMobile app for navigating a book no longer work correctly, as they did from IOS 8.3 on up. In particular, typing r on the Braille display’s keyboard, which moves to the reading window of the BardMobile screen, no longer moves to the last reading position of the book, and the Braille short cuts for navigating by page, volume and bookmark no longer move to the correct locations in the book. All of these short cuts appear to move to the end of volume 1 of the book, once a particular page number, volume number or bookmark is selected. In other words, the short cuts still move to the reading window and select the navigation units correctly, but the end result is to move to the end of volume 1 for all of these short cuts.
2. Although the Braille apostrophe is now displayed correctly as dot 3, words containing apostrophes are not contracted correctly. For example, the word “mustn’t” should be contracted as “mstn’t”, but is instead written as “mustn’t”, and the word “you’ll”, which should be written “y’ll”, is written as y, followed by the ou contraction, followed by dot 3, followed by ll. Note that contractions only apply to the contracted output setting when reading Braille.
Finally, I have a suggestion for improving the VoiceOver/speech/default dialect setting: I think it would be more convenient and less cumbersome to include the Alex voice and all of the SIRI voices as choices in the language rotor along with the voices that are native to VoiceOver, instead of the user having to switch between the Alex and SIRI voices by going into the default dialect setting each time. In other words, all of the voices installed on the Apple mobile device should be easily accessed by flicking up and down through the choices in the language rotor. Therefore, the user should be able to add all of the SIRI voices and Alex to the language rotor if desired.

Otherwise, so far, I think IOS 9 works very well, and I am satisfied with it. Thank you for your painstaking work and dedication to making Apple products as accessible as possible.

Sincerely,

Jeanine Mooers

Hey again guys, is there a VO bug in iBooks? I find sometimes it reads but other times it acts as if there's no text there.
Now I'm starting to wish I waited to upgrade.

I've read the description of the phone call bug as described above, but maybe I just plane do things differently. Instead of pressing the lock, or power button when a phone call arrives, instead I press the volume down button which silences the ring tone so that VoiceOver can better be heard. I only had one instance where the phone call went to the speakerphone, and wouldn't go back to the earpiece, but it only happened to me one time. I'm wondering if people who are experiencing the bug could try pressing the volume down button when the ringtone starts playing, to see if maybe that might not solve the problem, or minimize it enough so that VoiceOver will still work?

Hello all,
Many of you have listed VoiceOver bugs in iOS 9 while using an accessory such as a third party keyboards or Braille Displays and other tools with VoiceOver.
I mainly use my iOS device without these accessories, I totally depend on my device with VoiceOver and that's it. One of the serious issues I'm having is the VoiceOver curser in iOS 9.
If you open the official Twitter app or if you navigate through your contact list from A to Z you'll find that VoiceOver curser doesn't stay at the last focused area, it jumps to the top. This happens in most apps such as the official music app and the apps mentioned above. Also, flicking/ swiping with 1 finger through items isn't stable enough, sometimes it skip items on the screen and so especially on the official music app.
When using the on-screen Braille Input to type text, it inputs the wrong character. For example: typing the letter I doesn't work. Instead, it types the letter C. Typing the letter R using dots 1/2/3/5 inputs the letter H instead. VoiceOver doesn't speak when flicking left with 1 finger to delete a character. I've been having the same behaviour since iOS 8.
After updating to iOS 8.3, VoiceOver says space after each word while reading Arabic texts in a WhatsApp conversation or the official messages app. These are just some of the major accessibility bugs in iOS 9. This does not prevent me from using iOS 9, but having these bugs listed can help users report them to Apple.

I've encountered a strange bug, or should I rather call it a disfunction: When using the French female Siri HQ-voice, battery consumption seems to be twice as high as with former HQ voices, even with "Low power" mode turned on. Now I've removed that Siri HQ voice, battery consumption has returned to what it was under iOS 8.4.1.
Did anyone else experience such issues?

After reading all these reports, I'm glad I have held off upgrading. In fact, I'm still on 8.4, having never upgraded to 8.4.1 since I've no interest at all in Apple Music.

And could I politely remind the person who keeps mentioning behaviour in IOS 9.1 beta that they really shouldn't be doing that if they signed up to the NDA.

I've noticed that even though I have headings selecter under my voice over roter, it will usualy go back to characters and I have to get back to headings. very annoying. Anyone else noticing this?