Selecting Text Outside of Editable Fields

By Misty Dawn, 4 January, 2017

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

How does one, if this is even possible, select text in iOS using VoiceOver?

I have the Text Selection rotor option enabled, but this only seems to come up when I am in an editable text field.

Als, I tried the "reverse pinch" gesture but only heard the "cursor in a text field" clicky sound but nothing else, and no text was selected.

Options

Comments

By OldBear on Thursday, January 26, 2017 - 14:36

If you mean selecting text to copy to the clip board, you can do a three finger quadruple tap to copy the last text spoken by VO. I have not tried this after doing the read all two finger swipe down to copy everything, but I use it a lot with the different rotor settings like word or character etc. Might give it a try to see if that's what you're looking for.

By dvdmth on Thursday, January 26, 2017 - 14:36

If you do not have the text selection option in your rotor, then the text you are focused on cannot be directly selected for copying. Even sighted users will not be able to select the text. However, as stated in the above comment, you can use a three-finger tap four times to perform a copy of whatever was last spoken by VoiceOver, and this works with pretty much anything.

By Misty Dawn on Thursday, January 26, 2017 - 14:36

Hmm, interesting that we seem kind of to have an advantage here. You would think that everyone would want to copy/past these kinds of items. Interesting.

Though I suppose if we teach sighties to use VO for this... :)

Also, I read on another post since this one that you can do the label element gesture and then copy the text that is displayed there using the Edit > COpy options on the rotor/keyboard.

We do not have any kind of advantage as sighted people are able to take a snapshot of any screen at any time so we have something similar in the pure sense that we can take a text print screen of what the screen reader is speaking