VoiceOver IOS 10 Safari HTML Verbosity

By OldBear, 14 September, 2016

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

VoiceOver is speaking a lot more of the HTML elements with IOS 10 in Safari when flicking around. The most distracting part is that landmarks are spoken before any text, so you have to wait for it to go through all the landmark information, like article and so on, before you hear what the heading text is. It's also speaking all the table information, like Colum and row number with the flicks.
I can't find any way to lower the web page verbosity and it's making web pages difficult to read. Anyone else noticing this?

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Comments

By Lorelei on Monday, September 26, 2016 - 14:18

This bug/feature/whatever is annoying me to tears. There's a daily email I have to look at that gives row and column names for every single thing in the email. Before I upgraded, I could get through this email in half the time. I'm so frustrated with this defect that I've decided I'll give myself a while to calm down, then report it. It literally took me ten extra minutes to read this particular email the last several days, and that's just not ok. Time is money, and this is negatively impacting my ability to effectively manage my life. If it weren't affecting that one email, I can't say I would mind so much, but it is, so yeah. If anyone finds some kind of fix, please let us know soonest.

By OldBear on Monday, September 26, 2016 - 14:18

After the 10.02 update, the landmark announcements come after the text of headings. Voiceover is still as verbose and announces all table information on page layout tables etc. etc. I guess the end of article announcements are pushed to after the text of the article etc.
If I look at facebook mobile on Safari, it still takes several up or down flicks to get through a single heading, while it has to go through reading the same text and verbosity with each flick; in other words it's still a pain to use.

By Cliff on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 14:18

It seems like this verbosity issue seen in iOS 10.0 and 10.0.1, now has been resolved with the release of iOS 10.1. :)
At least for me, the landmark information is spoken after the link or heading. Just thought I'd point this out to all of you!
Have a great day!
Cliff

By OldBear on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 14:18

I'm not having all the table row and column information verbosity so far in 10.1. It's better than it was and I hope they will add some verbosity choices in the settings, at some point.
I use the Facebook mobile sight with Safari rather than the Facebook app, and there is still some issues with having to flick up and down several times to get through each heading with the rotor set to headings. It slows everything down, so I might report it again. Haven't found that issue on any other sights yet.

By Geoff37 on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 14:18

I am still getting irritating verbosity with ios 10.1. I asked apple accissibility for a switch in settings, sadly this has not been provided. Safari also has other issues, such as pages going blank, even more erratic focus and bookmarks appearing randomly. In future, I must temper my rush to update ios. If I get to the point where ios is working, maybe with a few minor bugs, I will stick with it until forced to update. It seems that every new ios version brings a new batch of VO issues.

By OldBear on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 14:18

Ya, there are some strange things going on with VO and Safari and I've mostly stopped using my phone for web browsing.
On the front page of Apple Vis where the latest threads with new posts are shown, sometimes the page layout table comes out with the column and row numbers and sometimes it doesn't say them. It probably shouldn't be reading page layout tables in the first place, but it's just hit or miss.
There's a major bug with multi line edit fields and moving by characters on my phone, but I'm still looking into it.

By Luke on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 14:18

Sounds terrible! I'll keep 9.3 until they pry it from my cold, dead hands, lol

By splyt on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 14:18

So fellow readers .. some of you are saying that the odd and verbose behavior has gone away, some of you are saying that is has partially gone away and some of you are saying that it did not go away at all in 10.1.

I am at 10.0 and I am thinking in updating but will do it only in case this behavior has been at least partially fixed ... can you try to sumarize if things have improved at least somehwat on 10.1 as im comparison to 10.0?

Thanks!

By Geoff37 on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 14:18

All I can report is that a web page I check several times a day that is a table of numerical readings is still being read out with extra unwanted verbosity. Also, I find name and password autofill no longer works on my ipad but does work on my iphone. Yes, I have checked settings.

By Haroon Probst on Saturday, November 26, 2016 - 14:18

I am finding exactly the same as your good self too.
A verbosity setting to stop the announcement of rows and columns on webpages would be a most welcome addition. :)

By Adam Samec on Monday, December 26, 2016 - 14:18

Hello,

for those still on later versions of iOS, I will describe the verbosity of web elements I am getting on iOS 10.1.1. The amount and order of information about an element is as follows: The text of the column header, the actual text, table coordinates, element type such as heading and its level, text field, checkbox or radio button followed by its state such as unchecked, link, beginning of a table followed by the number of rows and columns or the end of the table in case of the first or last table cell, landmark. Of course, if some of this information is not relevent, it is not read out.

Therefore, all the extra information is read after the actual text of an element, except for the column header if the table has them, which might be unwanted. An option to reorder and disable each of this information would be welcome, plus an option to quickly disable all the extra information using the rotor. The same way one can do it on macOS. Worth asking Apple to to support this on iOS as well.

Kind regards

By Luke on Monday, December 26, 2016 - 14:18

Hi. Thank you for the detailed explanation. I have been repeatedly putting off Apple's insistent upgrade prompts because of this very issue. From a user experience standpoint, do you find that this extra verbosity given after the element content negatively impacts your browsing experience, or is it something you quickly get used to? I want to have the latest version of iOS and I am getting tired of constantly dealing with the pop-up message, so in less it is a horrendous experience, I am about ready to go for it. Thanks again

By Adam Samec on Monday, December 26, 2016 - 14:18

Hello,

well, I think one can live with it, you can always skip to the next item or pause the speech if you don't want to listen to it. The column headers annouced before the cell content can be more problematic, but if you don't read such tables often, it's not that bad. Personally, I find the problem with not reading the content of an edit field under certain circumstances, such as when editing a text field which was not empty when the page loaded, more serious.

Kind regards

I updated to 10.2 today hoping the Safari VO issues had been fixed, but no such luck. There is still no way to turn down verbosity and some web pages I access regularly turn to a blank screen. I reported these when ios10 was first released. For me, these are major issues and I regret not staying with ios9.
I also have a Samsung tablet that came with Voice Assistant and I find myself picking up the Samsung for some tasks. Android accessibility has improved over the years to the point that it is as good as, or better, than ios for some tasks.