The Accessibility Bugs in iOS 11 for Blind and Low Vision Users; From Serious To Minor

Thanks to the braille bug and the fact I enjoy using my Smart Beatle with my iPhone, it appears I am going to have to hold off until the next update. I appreciate everyone who works so hard on compiling these bug lists so all of us can make informed decisions, even if those informed decisions mean not updating like I'd really like to. My inner nerd hates this, but my logical brain knows it's best and hopes the first patch to iOS11 will come soon.

To those who may be a bit leary of using the new drag and drop feature for fear of accidentally getting into the 3D shortcut menu, remember you can change the sensitivity of the touch on your device to make it harder to get into 3D menus. Go under Settings, General, Accessibility, and look for 3D Touch. Hope this helps.

For those who wish to use the new Siri voices in Voiceover, go to Settings, General, Accessibility, Voiceover, Speech, which you will double tap. Swiping left to right will first bring up your default settings for your default voice. Since I am in the U.S., I am going to use English for my examples. If I wanted to download the Australian Siri Female voice, I would swipe left to right till I heard the first voice name and double tap it. It will bring up all English voices available. If they are not already on your iPhone, it will give you the size of the voicewhen you swipe to it, and another swipe to the right will give you the option to download the voice. I would first find the Australian Siri Female voice in the list, flick again to the right, and double tap to download it. After it is finished downloading, I would then again find it in the list under Australian voices, and it should read, for example, "Siri Female ... button." Double tap on the button. You'll see a few options: Edit, Siri Female, and Play Sample. I would suggest first trying the "play sample" button. If you decide you don't like that particular voice, would rather try a new voice, and want it off your device, make sure Siri Female is highlighted, then use your roter to go to and delete the voice. If you do like the voice, double tap on Siri Female which will then select the voice. If your roter is set to the default voice, it will change immediately.

To change a voice in your language roter settings, scroll past the default voice options, and you'll see options for changing your roter voices. Follow the steps outlined above to download the voice. If the voice you wish to use is not already being used when you select it, you will need to navigate to the roter and flick to the voice in order to use it.

I hope this helps.

Just spoke with a apple person about news app, regarding voiceover not saying unread. She was able to confirm the bug on her iPhone. It is a bug.

VoiceOver does not announce either read or unread for articles in the News app. As there is now also no visual indicator of the read status; I would suggest that the change in VoiceOver behavior is not a bug, but simply expected behavior under iOS 11.

I took the time yesterday to do a clean install of the system using iTunes restore. I can confirm a lot of these bugs. The most annoying thing is the poor PDF support. I thought tagged PDF support was supposed to be a big improvement in this release. Sadly, it looks like this feature slipped past quality control. Maybe it will be better on macOS. I also found that the image description feature does not extract text from a PDF file that only contains images.

I'm also experiencing the Siri voice issue. Siri uses the old Nicky or Aaron voices instead of the newer high quality voices. I've tried switching the voice from male to female, but that doesn't work. I've also downloaded the new voices under speech settings and they work with VoiceOver. Unfortunately, they have pretty serious lag issues. I have also tried setting the new Siri female voice as the default for speak screen and speak selection, but this doesn't change anything in Siri. It also appears that you cannot use these new voices with third party apps. I don't know if the support hasn't been coded in or if Apple simply chose not to allow these to be used. Either way, it is disappointing. I'm looking forward to the macOS update. Hopefully it won't be as disappointing as iOS 11.

Hello,
I’ve noticed that in the Maps app, VoiceOver will not read street names. I tried this feature for New York City, where it should work, and the only thing I would get is no features visible and locale names, then it would say something about possible text and say a few letters. This also happens in other apps where you see the map, such as photo locations. Has anyone else experienced this?

Hi,

I've noticed two things:

1. I can confirm that the new Siri voices with Voiceover are somewhat sluggish and after a while something causes them to become corrupted. This is actually a very serious issue as it causes Voiceover to crash so often that the phone cannot be used. I couldn't even power off my phone to restart it, until I was lucky enough between the crashes to change the voice to daniel on my language rota. When the phone restarted, the Siri voice was deleted for Voiceover.

2. i thought we could still use the old Siri voices if we wanted to? Arthur and Martha are the british ones I believe? If so, i can't find those anywhere. I do slightly prefer Martha to daniel and would have had her back in light of the problems with the new voices, but it isn't proving possible.

While I'm writing, the UK currency bug is really very annoying and I would say it was a moderate rather than a minor bug to be honest. The inconsistent behaviour of the actions menu is also getting on my nerves. However, I do like having message previews back, and the new dock for the iPad is great once you master the gesture, which I kept confusing with the one that reads from the top of the page.

After updating iPhone 6 to iOs 11: No voiceover speech now. I hear click sounds when dragging my finger across icons etc., but no actual speech. To be clear, I am referring to vo speech, not siri voice issue. Volume control is definately turned up to the max. Sighted verification that VO is on. Sighted assitance to try switching to different voices - still no speech. Called and reported to Adam at Apple Access Line. He says no other report of this problem today. However, I have heard from 3 other VO user with similar experience.

M. Robbins, if you can force a restart of your phone, that may solve the problem. Also, perhaps your Voiceover speech got muted some how and a two fingered triple tap will fix it. Also, try using Siri to turn Voiceover off and back on again. Sorry, now I'm out of ideas.

Text selection is unreliable when trying to select text in the mail app. Text selection does not start from where you wish to start the selection. Also, when you are trying to make an apostrophe, it will make a left open quotation-mark or a right closed quotation-mark ‘’. A current workaround is to double tap and hold on the troublesome symbols and then find the correct one via the alternative characters. The apostrophe bug seems to be in every edit field.

An interesting post. I am still in IOS10 land, and the main query holding me back is with regards the drag and drop feature. Are we saying this will now be the only way to arrange apps? In previous versions of IOS (back when i was using the 4S) i absolutely hated dragging apps around, just couldn't seem to get away with it and admit to asking sighted people to move apps for me. I really welcomed the procedure IOS10 allows where one simply flicks up/down to rearrange apps/icons. Has this now disappeared again or have i misunderstood the whole point of it? Thanks in advance for putting me right.

Hi, OK a minor issue, but if I 3 finger swipe up to open the control center ios used to say control center now it just opens and reads the first toggle in the control center, minor yes but a bug.
regarding the phone vibrating on charge, the bug that has been fixed is that if you connect the phone to a charger or it powers on from dead while charging the phone will vibrate when the charger connects and the noise plays that is the issue that has been fixed.

honestly I don't know why people are getting so hung up about this drag and drop feature,
the feature might be referred to as drag and drop but for VoiceOver we don't have to drag icons around like in the bad old days, basically we tap and hold on an icon making sure not to trigger 3d touch or you can turn it off totally under accessibility if needed, anyway once VoiceOver goes into edit mode you then flick up to select to drag a particular icon then find where you want to put it and again flick up or down to choose the option you need, seriously people read the blog post on ios 11 accessibility features, it explains the process very clearly, really it hasn't changed two much since ios 10 apart from having to hold on an icon first before being able to start the move process.

I too, have found that VoiceOver volume is quieter in this update. I've tried it with the Siri voices, with Samantha, and with Alex, but its the same thing. I use a ComPilet Air II with my hearing aids, and normally volume 1 to volume 6 is just fine when its connected, now I have to turn it up to 12 or 18.Not much of a problem, unless I want to Listen to music or VoiceDream where the voices are much louder.. I really hope this is fixed in the next update. I also hope Braille is better in the next update. I just got a new display and was hoping to use it more, but it will be harder with the update as is.

M. Robbins, I understand. I didn't say anything about the News app. That's a different post. I was giving you options to try to recover your Voiceover voice. Go back and read the last post I wrote. It's just a few suggestions for things you might try to get Voiceover working again.

Hello,
If it happens that you cannot hear Voiceover after upgrading to iOS 11, try increasing the volume of Voiceover by using roter because it is set to 0%.
If you previously, on iOS 10, had the volume set to 1%, that will now count 0% and as a result, voiceover will be muted and you will not be able to hear it.
Using the roter, you should be able to increase it to a satisfactory level to start using your iPhone. I faced this problem on mine, and even a friend of mine had this problem too and we fixed it through the explanation I wrote above.

I may have found a bug with the App Store. When you double tap on updates, it does not refresh automatically. You have to do if three finger swipe down several times just to get it to recognize there is new updates.

Another bug I noticed is voiceover doesn't automatically speak notifications when they come in on the lock screen despite having speak notifications on in voiceover settings. Has anyone experienced this?

Hi everyone,

I don't really know if this is a bug or just me not getting how to do this, but I've had problems with adding contacts to my favourites lists ever since IOS10.x, both on my old Iphone 5s and my iphone SE. I just updated to iOS11 on my Iphone 5s (just to try it out with a phone I don't use that much) hoping this issue would be fixed, but I still bump into the same problem.

So, the short story is: I want to add a number to favourites. I go to contacts, select a contact, swipe down to "add to favourites", double tap that as I should and get the list of available options to add to favourites. There I get the problem. Despite the contact in question having several phone numbers and emails added to their contact card, I can only select a few different things to add to favourites; for instance "message iphone", "call iphone", "video facetime" and "email home". I can not find any way to expand this list of available numbers or emails and don't understand why not all numbers and options are available. This same problem occurs also if I do the action from Phone, Favourites, Add, and then Select a contact.

As I said, I've had this same problem on both phones since iOS10.x an apparently still in iOS11. I find this terribly annoying; not just because I don't always want to ask Siri to quickly call someone, but also because I want to add some people/numbers to my favourites so they can get through even when I have Do Not Disturb turned on. Does anybody know about a fix for this, or is this really a bug? Maybe even a OS bug and not just a VO bug?

This was the very first thing I checked out after updating, so I haven't really had time to explore the rest yet. I can confirm though that the new Siri voices aren't working for me either. I have also tried switching from male to female and back again, and also to other languages (whom my father showed me last week worked even in the beta) without positive result. Very disapointed about this, too, for I really liked the sound of some of the new voices.

The bug volume buttons not making sound when changing volume is true for my iphone 5s, too. Looks like most VO users experience this.

Another volume related issue: Is there anybody else that has found the sound volume for ringer and alerts to be turned down (or up, for that matter) with the volume buttons DESPITE "Change with buttons" being turned off in the Sounds settings? I have had this for ages and I can't figure out why it happens. Turning the setting off should be enough. Apparently not. And I still want the sound to be the same volume regardless of the volume of VoiceOver, music or other sounds.

Another VO bug that is still present (one I've asked about in the Applevis Forum earlier) is the inability to reorder Language on the router. I know this bug has been there, AND been reported, since iOS10.0, but it still hasn't been fixed. As far as I can see, you can reorder all other items on the router except Language.

This is what I've found out so far, after very short testing. Hope someone knows something about the favourites-thing. I might get back here if I bump into other bugs. I'm far from a pro-user, but I know what I want the phone to do a normal day, so in case things don't work, I'll report for sure.

Thanks everyone for sharing your experiences, tips and tricks!

Replying to a few items mentioned by other people here:

1. The fact that news articles are no longer announced as being read or unread is definitely not a bug, but rather an intended change in the behavior of the app. This was also changed visually, so the experience for sighted users is the same here. I think it is just as well, because VoiceOver did not do a good job identifying which articles were read or unread in iOS 10 anyway.

2. The volume buttons no longer click in iOS 11. I’m pretty sure this is an intentional change, but I can’t say that for certain.

3. Someone noticed the added option for shut down in general settings. I initially thought that was odd as well, but it turns out that option is necessary for the upcoming iPhone X. That phone does not have a home button, so the user needs to hold down the side button for accessing Siri instead. This, in turn, means that you cannot power down the device by holding the side button, as you do with current iOS devices, so Apple needed to provide another way to turn the device off. I guess adding the option to general settings was the best they could come up with.

4. I agree that this version of iOS is buggier than recent releases, but it is nowhere near as buggy as iOS 8. That was a very bumpy ride, and if you didn’t experience it first hand, then consider yourself lucky.

I don’t know if this is a bug or not, but it is an annoyance… I have noticed when I’m going somewhere in a car, every time I check my phone once we get somewhere, there’s a notification telling me about do not disturb will not send messages if I’m driving or whatever…, I thought it would be a message that popped up maybe once or twice telling me about the new feature, but it happens every time I go somewhere…. I have that feature set to manual, and off, but it still wants to tell me about the feature every time

Another way to access media controls when quick nav is on.is to press control and option.
This works with other functions on the top row as well.

Not as handy.

Since control+option is the VO keys, how is that supposed to make the media keys work, since f8 is usually the play key, but if you do ctrl+option then f8 that brings up the voice over settings. So, a bit confused.

I found a solution which actually makes things productively better. At first I had voice over saying “delete” when I hit backspace. However, it would say “delete” then the word I just typed whenever I’d hit the space bar or a punctuation after the word.
Well, I fixed that by going into verbosity settings and changing the delete verbosity setting so it just makes a sound when I backspace. Funnily enough, which is a good thing, it does not make the sound when I hit space after words either. But, there you go. Yeah, that bug may still be there, but, changing that setting to where it just makes a sound, and a nice little beep at that, appears to have cleared things up.

Here are some bugs that I have come across but haven't been mentioned.
<ul> <li> Lock screen: when 1 or more notifications is showing; a double tap with 2 fingers (magic tap) will show a list of old notifications, but there is no way of dismissing this list. A second magic tap will toggle media playback</li>
<li> cover sheet: When opening the cover sheet with a 3 finger swipe down from the status bar, VoiceOver will speak a seemingly random old notification</li>
<li> cover sheet: when navigating the list of notifications, VoiceOver can become choppy or unresponsive. Tested with the Daniel voice</li>
<li> incoming notifications: occasionally I have found that VoiceOver focus can Jump around when notifications are displayed</li>
<li> App switcher: VoiceOver focus can be inconsistent in the app switcher, especially when closing apps. It is possible to close the wrong app</li>
<li> app switcher: after dismissing the switcher, VoiceOver can suddenly jump focus to a part of the switcher even though it is no longer displayed</li>
<li> When VoiceOver encounters the text string " °C" or " °F" it adds a Zero. E.G 68.3 °F becomes 68.30°F. This seems to occur with all voices</li>
<li> When VoiceOver encounters a decimal point and a ° sign in the same text string it does not speak the decimal as it should but instead leaves a pause. E.G 21.4°C is spoken as 21,,4°C</li>
<li> Mail app: when in a message, a 3 finger swipe left or right to move between messages does not work efficiently and does not place focus in the body of the message as it used to. This bug has been around since Ios 10.0</li>
<li> Mail app: when in a message, the back button does not always display the correct unread message badge</li>
<li> maps: when focus is on a map feature and you perform a 3 finger tap, the report of distance between your location and the map feature is broken. E.G a road that is 1.2 miles away is announced as being 53666579 miles away. Now unless I am actually on Mars then this is a bug! </li>
<li> VoiceOver settings: navigating around the speech>voice screen does not always work correctly. Specifically: when downloading a voice, certain actions can cause VO to become unresponsive</li> </ul>

Full screen Zoom no longer works properly on my iPad Air after the iOS 11 upgrade. iOS 11 Zoom still appears to function OK on my iPhone 6, though. When I enter Zoom with a three finger double tap on my iPad Air, only the lower section of the screen is magnified, leaving a strip at the top of the screen , approximately the depth of a row of home screen icons, unmagnified. I can't pan the zoomed window to reach the top of the screen. I've tried switching to window zoom and back to full screen zoom but am unable to access full screen zoom. Is this an issue that others have found? I've not reported to Apple yet, but will do so soon.

Hi all,
At the beginning I should say that given the news about the betas of iOS 11, I was afraid to install it on my devices. I use iPhone SE and iPod Touch 6g so these devices can have the new system.
I also use Polish language.

After installing, I began to like the system but liking does not mean that I love everything.
What I like:
1. the new way of activating the drop and drag feature. I remember that when I was teaching elderly people on iOS 10, they became anxious when they accidentally flicked up and VO announced the process of reordering their apps.
2. I like that app switcher turns off when all apps are closed. It, however, needs some improvements as after closing an app its name appears again which causes anxiety.
3. I like the files application which may be useful and more comfortable than opening several external drives.
Bugs in my opinion:
1. the way of reading units, now the VO reads e.g. 50 percent sign. It used to read 50 percent, etc. IN the weather app, when I switched off punctuation hours were read without the number of degrees e.g. 10 am: cloudy, etc.
2. The app switcher needs to be polished so that when the last app is closed home screen appears.
3. volume sounds while using physical buttons are necessary but not mandatory.
4. The app files needs to be polished:
A) when leaving a file the app cursor does not go to the previous position, e.g. the folder one browses through;
B) when opening a file, a doubletap gesture doesn’t work. Instead, one has to find the pause button and perform necessary actions.
5. I don’t understand reducing VO volume to 0, a double tap with three fingers stands for it, I guess.

I don’t discuss the way of recognising images as it doesn’t work at all.
These are the hottest, in my view, but important bugs.

Hi all, just noticed this issue in the mail app, if you focus on the search field in the mail app VoiceOver reports that actions are available but it wants to give access to the drag and drop feature which we would normally use on the home screen in edit mode, trying to activate it does nothing apart from make VoiceOver freeze for a few seconds.
also the options to download voices seem a total mess to me, I am seeing 3 or 4 options called siri male and siri female all different sizes no idea which ones the new voices are and there is no option to play a sample for each one.

The driving bug will drive me crazy! Am I really going to get that wretched notification about do not disturb while driving every time I go on the Tube? I got it this morning and was hoping it would be something that happened only once, but if the earlier poster is right that is going to be very annoying.

I also can confirm that raising the smart cover on iPad Pro no longer results in Voiceover's speaking the time. This is annoying as I used to find that feature very handy.

Alex, if you are in your default voice settings, you will see a default Siri Female and Siri Male voice for each language your phone is set up for. For me, I get Siri Male and Siri Female for U.S. English, UK English, and Australian English. My suggestion is either flick all the way through to which version you want or swipe through headings. Hope that helps.

1. Using my Fcous blue, and the Apple wireless keyboard, I can't type in the address bar in Safari. The keyboard won't enter text, and I can't use the space bar with dot 7 for baskspace or dot 8 for enter. If the keyboard is unpaired, I can do it in braille, but in iOS 10, I could use either the braille keyboard or the Apple one for any text fields except some password fields where the Apple keyboard would not work.

2. VoiceOver "holds" the braille display. If I want to use another device, I have to turn VO off with the Accessibility Shortcut. Otherwise my Focus will only work with the one device.

3. There is now no way for me to read the battery status for my Apple Watch or paired bluetooth keyboard. It used to be in notification centre but now that's just 3 empty pages.

Hi, not sure if this has been reported before, there is a bug with the Bluetooth icon on the status bar, VoiceOver always reports it as connected even if there is no device connected to my phone currently. I tried restarting the phone and it even shows connected when the phone has been rebooted and no Bluetooth device has been used with the phone since reboot.

In fact that's another problem, the bluetooth doesn't turn off from the control centre, but you should go to settings>Bluetooth to turn it off manually. You will no longer see the status not connected or connected.

So last night on my 5S, this exact bug happened, and what a scare it gave Hopefully it'll get fixed, so we can take advantages of the Siri voice with VO in iOS in Spanish. I really loved the Siri male voice when I was using it and trying it out!!

Hi, this isn't a bug that Bluetooth doesn't turn off through the control center, instead if you use the control center toggles both Bluetooth and wifi will disconnect the phone from any devices or networks they are connected to but the radios will still be available to connect to new devices or networks. really the toggles should be called something like disconnect Bluetooth or wifi, apple have said this is intentional behaviour. I admit though I hadn't realized the control center toggles were now for disconnection, confusing yes if you don't know in the first place especially when relying on VoiceOver.

I have encountered many of the posted issues. Some are minor, some are head scratchers.

The biggest gripe I have is with choppy voices and audio. At first I thought it was related to a specific voice, the new Siri, or specific apps, like Mail, but even after switching to Ava, rebooting the phone, and not touching the mail app, i have had choppy speech, and audio in Music and iCatcher. Toggling Voice Over off and on seems to help, for a while.

There seems to be a bit of oddness with the new keyboard changes, as well as a bit of confusion.
I have read a few posts here and have also tried and verified there working.
To reiterate:
At first, we seem to had lost the playback and transport controls to this release. But not so.
Pressing control in combination with the playback or transport key of choice will work. This includes the volume controls as well.

The second work around, which is odd to me is quick navigation off.
Again, this will also bring back the missing functionality to playback and volume.

I am not quite sure why the control applies.
I do not own a mac, and do not know if this may be a compatibility merging to keep voice over consistent.

There has also been a few additional hot keys introduced with this release utilizing the function keys.

I just have not found documentation proving or explaining the changes fully and clearly from apple.
To further compound things, many third party keyboards retain function keys for their own use so one needs to press an additional modifier key to pass the function key through as it were.

There are a few other bugs with the notes app and keyboard where in quick mode off, line navigation breaks and there is no line reading.
This I resolved by changing the channel on my keyboard and then returning to the device channel for my phone. It can also be resolved by switching off the keyboard's power and back on.

And as said before, it is now possible to wake up the phone using a password from the keyboard provided quick navigation mode is off.

I am hoping people will report more regarding the keyboards to help out as well as things are found.
My testing has been done using a Logitec K480.

Have you guys noticed on the music app when you try to reorder a song from a custom playlist I try to reorder the song by double tap and hold and try to wait for the sound, but there is no sound, and there is no way to tell where you’re moving song from or move to something.
I told the accessibility people from Apple to help fix that issue, and I said that in the Feedback app when I got the final version. Hopefully they will fix that issue soon Because I use this a lot!

I don't think this is an accessibility issue, but when you go to your downloaded music and select songs, it sorts by artist. When you select artist, it displays by songs. Also, when you use another audio app to listen to content, when you exit the app, either nothing will happen or a completely different song will be playing from your music library. Hope that made sense. Also, if you have a song playing and then close out the Music app in the App Switcher, a completely different song will start playing if you magic tap. Of note, this happens to me with and without shuffle turned on.

I found we can fix the strange' symbol by going to keyboard settings and turning
Smart Punctuation off.

I updated my iPhone 6s Plus to iOS 11, and one of the most irritating and annoying bug is that the phone will randomly decide to respring, not reboot upon closing an app from the app switcher. Has anyone also had or are having this problem on your devices?