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

Hello

I have found a bug in the new Podcasts app. When I try to use the New option of continuing where I left off, it incorrectly announces the amount of time in the podcast elapsed. Like if the podcast is 58 minutes long, but you’ve listen to 20 minutes, it will still say that there are 58 minutes remaining in the podcast. I don’t know if this is an accessibility bag. I have already reported the bug to Apple.

I will locate this keyboard settings and test my luck.

Hi,

I have reported the following to Apple Accessibility. I think that this might only apply if you use SIRI voices as your default for Voiceover.

I am a blind person, using the latest IOS 11 on an IPhone 6S+ with Voiceover.

I live in the UK and decided to select the SIRI Female Voice as my default for Voiceover use and the American Male Voice for SIRI itself. All works well until an alarm, which I have set via the Clock app, goes off. If I press one of the physical volume buttons, to snooze the alarm, it seems to crash the speech. When I restart the phone and get sighted assistance to log in, I try the triple tap Home Button, to activate Voiceover, to no avail. I then use SIRI to start Voiceover, which does then start, but only with the standard Daniel voice. When I go into Settings, General, Accessibility, Voiceover, Speech, I discover that neither the SIRI Male nor Female voices have been downloaded and I have to download them again, befoe being able to go back and use them as my default speech.

It seems that there is a bug somewhere which removes UK SIRI voices, if they are the default, when an alarm goes off and is snoozed. This issue has happened consistentely to me now, after I have downloaded both Male and Female SIRI voices. This could be a major issue to blind people, if they lose speech on their phone and do not have sighted assistance to help them.

@Charlie you've described exactly what I found but more helpfully as you've got more of an idea about the scenario that caused this to happen. When it happened to me, I couldn't even power the phone off and was seriously concerned about what exactly I was going to be able to do. Luckily, some random swiping changed the voice to daniel on my language rota. I was very fortunate I had an additional Language with Daniel as the voice. have you also noticed that the Siri female in particular is somewhat sluggish with Voiceover? I now wish I'd stuck with martha (enhanced) which was the voice it used immediately upon the update, because I can't now get her back and she is different from the new Siri female voice. For the moment I have gone back to Daniel.

The following bug has already been reported to apple last night. Doing a 3D touch on the messages app while the context menu comes up, when you select a contact from that list, your not placed in ready to type your message to this contact. In stead, your put at the top level of the app, and then need to find the person who you want to message. Sent a screen recording to apple. The bug has been reproduced and a report put through.

Prior to iOS 11, whenever I wanted to launch an app, I could enter the Spotlight Search and type part of the app's name (e.g., pand for Pandora). Then, I would find the app listed. Now that I have upgraded to iOS 11, Spotlight Search requires me to enter the full name of the app (e.g., Pandora) before it shows up on the results screen. Fortunately, using Braille Screen Input (BSI), I have a work-around for starting an app that happens to be burried in a folder, but I am wondering how those who depend on Spotlight Search to start an app are finding this to work for them.

Thank you.

Regards,

Curtis Chong

Hi all, OK I have a question about notifications under ios 11, I am not sure if this question is an accessibility bug or apple breaking something with all there notification center tinkering.
OK so the way I have my notifications set up is that I don't have them display on the lock screen because I don't want VoiceOver randomly reading me things out when the phone is locked in my pocket or sometimes reading me the time date etc.
So under ios 10 what used to happen is that the phone would be locked in my pocket, and I would get a sound play when something happened e.g a message on WhatsApp, then I would unlock the phone, and sounds would then play again and notification banners would pop up with whatever notifications had been triggered off while the phone was locked in my pocket.
Now though under ios 11 when I unlock my phone I get no sounds, and no banners but notifications do still display in notification center. this means for example if I have put my phone down to go and eat I must unlock it then make a point of checking notification center or looking at app icons to see if anything happened while I was away from my phone because I don't see banners or hear sounds once I unlock my phone.
If the phone is just locked in my pocket I do hear sounds as I would expect though. any ideas how I can get old behaviour back or is this just a bad move on apples part?
if I have the phone unlocked in my hand and an event happens then banners do still display and are read by VoiceOver and disappear as I would expect its specifically when the phone is locked I am having issues.

I can’t tell any difference between the iOS 11 uk Siri voices and iOS 10 ones and in fact I’m a little underwhelmed by Siri, can’t see anything that has changed.
I can still open apps using spotlight just typing in a few letters however the app you want never appears in the top hits as it used too but instead is somewhere lower down in the grid of results. Also for some strange reason VoiceOver reads the top hit as whatever letters you searched for. E.g if you type in WI, perhaps to search for Wikipedia, VoiceOver reports the top hit as ”WI” which isn’t anything!
Edit: I think I found a solution to the spotlight problem. If you turn off Siri suggestions in search in the Siri and search section of settings this seems to revert spotlight to the old behaviour.

Could someone explain a bit more about the problems with the PDF Support please.
I use this format consistently and was wondering if the problems occur on all devices running iOS 11.

Hello,
This looks to be a bug, and I am not sure if its only me. Safari seems to have a problem with longesh bulletted lists. I was reading this article on Safari this morning:
https://www.cnet.com/news/get-a-moto-g5s-plus-for-229-99/
and on the list of items in it, I seemed to be jumping back up to the address bar when flicking to the next line.

After updating to iOS 11, when I activate VoiceOver in Safari, the browser locks up. Happens sporadically in Chrome too. Still trying to figure out why. Tried reset settings but didn’t help.

EDIT: Solved through reset of content and settings.

iOS 11 seems to not disconnect from Braille displays when the screen is locked. This is a change in behavior. It does not seem to bother all displays, e.g., I've not noticed any crashes, etc., with a Focus display. However using a Handy Tech Active Star with an iPad and iOS 11 this seems to cause issues, it works for a time then the display will stop displaying Braille, or keys will stop responding or both. I still have iOS issues with actilino too but this may or may not be related. My advice for any Handy Tech user who hasn't updated yet would be to wait. Or if anyone has solved this please let me know.

I use a sparin wireless keyboard for most of my bluetooth stuff, and I've definitely noticed one annoying thing that has changed. if anyone can offer a workaround for it, I'd appreciate it.
Before, I would be able to press the button at the very top right-hand corner of the keyboard (the button to the right of the F12) and it would conveniently lock my device for me. this is no longer happening. the button now does nothing at all. Does anyone have any other ideas how else I can lock the device using the bluetooth keyboard instead of the device itself?

I am finding this new "feature" of the last used action item being persistent in the mail app very, very annoying and prone to errors.

First, when one swipes through the list of actions when focused on a mesage in the list of messages in the mail app, the "activate" action is described as the "default action". Thus, when I move to another mesage in the list, I expect that if I single finger double tap the default action will really happen. This is not the case.

Secondly, if the user always have to check which action is actually active before performing the action, this is a waste of time and very inefficient. I shouldn't have to check which action is active if there is a "default action" (and there should be a "default action" for any item).

If you are as frustrated with this new behavior as I am and have accidentally deleted as many messages as I have and/or or had to take more time to check which action will be performed, I encourage you to let your voices be heard by writing to the Apple Accessibility support team.

--Pete (hopeing this will be changed back to how things were in iOS 10 really soon)

Audio routing seems to be missing from the roter.
Also the switch in Siri to choose the microphone she listens with seems to be missing.

@Alex Walis, not sure about all apps, but I have my Outlook notifications set to banners, but not to show on the coversheet (lock screen), and it works as it use to in iOS10, I only get the sound when a new mail comes in, but then once I unlock my phone, the outlook notifications play again and the message previews show up, unless there are allot of them, in which case outlook just shows an alert telling you how many new notifications/items you have.

I don't know if this behavior is app specific though, since this is the only app that I have set to not show me notifications on the coversheet, and mainly because I get allot of mail.

But it has been my experience that VO will not say anything when a new message comes in or a new notification comes in, unless I unlock the phone, or if it's just sitting right side up on a table, and the proximity sensor is not blocked. If you have your phone in your pocket and don't want VO talking, just be sure to have the proximity sensor covered or facing your leg/inside of the pocket, and VO should not speak, since the phone will not even wake up since it knows the proximity sensor is blocked. If you have raise to wake on though, this might be triggering the speech and awakening of the phone; I noticed that VO would randomly speak while the phone was in my pocket if I had the feature turned on, so I got rid of it, and with it got rid of that problem. :)
If your phone is on the table and you don't want it speaking, turn it right side down, so the proximity sensor is covered, so the phone won't turn on when notifications come in, unless it's a phone call.

I've been using my phone is this way since the 4s days, and have never had an issue with it.

For those who are bothered by the constant alerts from the phone about the new do not disturb while driving feature, either turn it on and then turn it off while driving, or have your phone unlocked while you start driving, and select "not now" when the alert comes up, and it *should not* come up again.

I reported this minor 1 in beta, but I see it's still around: if you do a 3 finger swipe right from the first page of the home screen (the today view), VO will not change pages, but it will say "page 0 of X" where X is the total number of pages you have available on the home screen. This doesn't happen if you swipe left to the last page on the home screen.
Anyone else notice that?

Has anyone been able to get alternative characters to work when using the default keyboard?
When using touch typing, I would place my finger on the desired character, such as n, and wait a second or 2, and the alternative characters such as n~ would come up. I would then slide and pick the 1 I wanted. Now they don't seem to work or show up at all. Can anyone else confirm or deny this?

No, its broken.
I too have to use the braille input method as well. Sucks because I use a bluetooth keyboard exclusively while traveling and it was of great functionality to use spot light search. Now I have to bring the keyboard out of quick nav and right arrow to the app I want. I can still press enter after typing the start up spelling of the app I want, but since there is no verbal verification I have opened other apps with similar spellings.

Hello. I am dealing with a bug that was randomly present prior to IOS11 while typing in edit fields.
When using a blue tooth headset or ear buds, a beep is heard after every word voice over speaks.
It is a bit of a random happening according to devices, but for my 6s is pretty consistent.
Makes it a pain to work with because even blind square is hunted by it.

I am also having external devices dropped with no warning randomly after a few seconds of activation.
Again this one is random.

Has anyone figured out how to permanently get rid of these?

When I compose a new text and start to type in a recipient name, a list of candidates appears. Normally, I can swipe right to get into the list and land on the topmost candidate. This works fine as long as I'm not using a bluetooth keyboard. Since iOS 11 on my iPhone SE, VO+right arrow (to swipe right) takes me to the "add contact" button and then stops - I can not continue into the recipient candidate list. In fact, I have to VO+left arrow multiple times, and focus eventually takes me to the list, but takes me to the bottom (least likely) candidate in the list.

The odd thing is that just having the BT keyboard turned on causes this behavior. Swipe right on the screen either takes me into the list, or doesn't, depending on whether or not the BT keyboard is powered on.

Why would the simple act of turning on a BT keyboard change the swipe order of controls in the text message app?

I could not reproduce the issue in the Mail app when I tried to perform the equivalent function, so this issue is specific to the Message app.

My fix for the DND notifications was to go into Setting and set Do Not Disturb to Off. The iOS installation apparently sets this to Manual, which triggers the notifications.

Once the notification is displayed, I could never find a way to do anything effective with it via VoiceOver. It's not an accessible notification, as near as I can tell.

Has anyone experienced this voice mail bug? When I hit voice mail in my phone, I can hear the voice mail but I can't delete it. I have to close the phone in the app switcher and go back to it then the delete option is there.

I've experienced a problem being notified of my incoming texts on my new iPhone 8. I've received several texts without hearing any sound and the text is not spoken, although I want it to be spoken. I even received a phone call where the caller ID was spoken, but the phone didn't ring. That too was very strange. Any ideas or work arounds? Do Not Disturb is off.

First let me start by stating that I am very disappointed with iOS 11. It is the worse iOS ever. I been using iPhone since 4. Second action does not work well. When I am in notification and slide up to clear a notification does not work well. also in email. The roter does not work well. When I select action in email, to delete email, works for 3 or 5 emails but later it changes. I also get the beep from my Bluetooth. It hurts my ear. I like apple but this is the worse iOS.

I have been trying the new Siri American female voice for voice over. On my iPhone 7, the "B" bug is back. The letter is pronounced as "E" when typing, and words starting with a capital B are often mispronounced. I am back to using Ava. Despite liking the new voice for clarity and expressiveness, I don't like the pregnant pauses, and this letter B issue.

Not sure about Siri, but Samantha has been doing the b bug issue since ios9.

To delete emails,go to edit, select email you want to delete, go to trash button and tap on it. It seems that old way to delete does not work. Also notification still not working and when you want to delete message, action does not work. I have to use the roter to select action. It does not stay still.

As was noted, a very annoying bug is currently out there showing the remains of a broken message after you delete a text message using the action menu. The nul item goes away after I have closed and reopened the messaging app and I am hoping this is resolved very soon.

As for the notification screen, I get a lot of push notifications, primarily from my Overcast podcast application alerting me to new episodes and when alerts come in from MLB At Bat. IF I am working inside another app with my screen unlocked, such as when I am viewing a video in YouTube, the alert will read as it always did in the old versions of iOS. But if the screen is locked, all that VO announces is the time. I have to physically swipe around to get the notifications to read and I find this annoying.

One other thing and I don't know if this is unique to those of us using VO, but some times the device will run hot and battery levels quickly drain. However I can't seem to identify the particular app that is draining the battery. Powering down and restarting the device seems to be the only solution as this was happening at one point yesterday with VO indicating when I doubletap the home button that no apps were open to be managed. Any thoughts and observations on the above items are appreciated. I'm a heavy user of VO and iOS for over 3 years, so I can hopefully help some folks out as well. DM me at 1baseballnerd on twitter.

First let me start by saying that I had an apple iPhone since the 4 came out. I got the 4s, 5, 5s, 6 and currently have the 7. Love apple and like the iPhone. With this mind, iOS 11 is the worse system ever. It has more bugs that any other iOS in the past. Notification does not read messages, clearing notification does not work well, message does not delete messages by flicking up finger any more, email does not delete emails by flicking finger up anymore, app switch sometimes does not close the app when I finger up to close, instead it spells the name of the app. Also roter does not stay where I select. Action moves and sometime letter is selected. It is sad that I have to say this because I like apple and always downloaded the new iOS as it came out without any issues.

Hi all!
I can't find that this has been mentioned here before, so maybe it's a bug on only my iPhone 7?
Ever since updating to iOS 11.0.1, I constantly' have the region tracking icon, or location tracking, showing to' the right of the clock in my status bar. I was a bit worried that this will drain my battery faster, so I went through the list of apps using location services under the privacy settings, but no apps is currently using location services.
Even when I completely shut off all location services, VoiceOver still gives me the location icon up in the status bar, and that shouldn't be possible. I have yet to get a sighted person confirm that the icon actually is showing, and that it might just be a VoiceOver bug that causes VO to announce the icon.
Anyway, I think this is a bit wierd, and I don't like having that icon there 24/7. For once it might affect my battery, and for second I don't like having my location constantly shared, especially when I don't know where that information is going. I was for a moment thinking that my iPhone might have been hacked, but I doubt it. But you never know. Either way, I don't like it.
By the way, my iPhones language settings is set to norwegian, so sorry if I don't use the correct english terms for location tracking stuff. :)
But is this just me, or have others seen this too? Is this a VoiceOver thing, or is this location tracking icon real?
Cliff

While I agree that this new IOS has some pretty annoying bugs, I like most of the changes to notifications and app switcher. There are things that absolutely need to be fixed ASAP, especially in messages and reading notifications when phone is locked, but even with those bugs in the equasion, I remember ios 8 being far worse.

I am using IPhone SE and IOS 11.02. With the upgrade to IOS 11 I am facing problem in messaging app. I am no longer able to delete messsages in the message app. I swipe up with one finger to go to delete option and double tap while a conversation is selected. Nothing happens and the message is still there in the list. If I activate edit button on the left top corner and double tap on an conversations, again nothing hapens, message is not selected and the delete btton on right bottom of the screen is inactive.

f I double tap any conversation from normal message screen, I get to the list of messages in the conversation. Here I can swipe with single finger to go to "more" option and use the delete command from here. It does show confirmation and I am finally able to delete the selected message. When I am back in the manu list of conversations, the conversation still remains. It is only after re- starting the app when this conversation is finall gone from the list.

This is a majour bug and I haven't seen any such bug reported till now. Is it specific to IPhone SE or am I missing something?

I use a variety of IOS devices and am noticing the following symptom on ios 11. in an app where you are scrolling down a page or more of information and then trying to navigate away from that (going back for example), although the button is announced, it does not perform the action. You can scroll back up to the top (page one of an article) and then it will work. a good app to check this out on is something like the guardian newspaper app or apps like Lire.

My other observation is that in a small number of cases the focus is announced as usual but on double tapping I can activate a button next to the one announced. this is not consistent across apps at all - but within apps very consistent. a good one to try is thetrainline where selecting a return train ticket results in selecting terms and conditions.

s

Hi there. I’ve experienced a bug with Siri where it will just randomly crash after I ask it a question, and the whole phone will just hang for a few seconds, then it will come unfrozen and start working again. This is with voiceover enabled and on the iPhone 8+. This bug is inconsistent, most of the time Siri works just fine, so I am wondering if this happens with sited users as well. Also, having a problem with a bluetooth keyboard where sometimes when I turn it on, it will just make that end of list sound whenever I type a key, then when I turn the keyboard off, it will be stuck on a number and won’t stop spamming it until I turn the bluetooth keyboard back on and press the number. I’ve experienced this bug much less often since I upgraded to the iPhone 8+, but it was a serious issue for me on my 6+, as it would happen a lot more frequently. I use a Logitech keyboard. I hope Apple fixes all of these issues. This hasn’t been as bad as IOS 8’s release at least.

Yes, I have noticed this in several apps, but not very consistently. IN the News app, for example, I will sometimes double tap the "back" button from within an article to get back to the list articles, but no matter how many times I perform the double tap, I will remain in the article. sometimes I can fix this by scrolling the page, other times by getting out of the News app and then back in again.

As I said, most of the time double tapping works, but occasionally it is kind of persnickity. Performance could be more reliable.

--Peteof article,

Hi folks. Pretty discruntled. I've managed to hold off upgrading to IOS11 until last night and then my phone left me with no choice but to upgrade to IOS11.03 and frankly, I'm not enjoying the experience particularly. I cannot delete messages and despite coming here to find out how to get around this, the proposed method does not work for me. I'm on an iPhone SE. Any tips?

Ouch, sorry to hear you were forced. I also keep getting the notification on my iPad Mini, saying that iOS 11.0.3 has been downloaded, but that is only because my device was plugged in and on wi-fi. I found that if you simply turn off wi-fi while your device is plugged in for charging, and then unplug when charged up and then turn on wi-fi afterwards, that prevents your device from downloading in the background. If your device has downloaded iOS but not installed it, just go to Setting, then General, then I think iCloud and Device Storage, and then select the Manage Storage for your device, not the iCloud, you can find and delete the download.

As for those who've the download and upgrade has already been done, for the iMessage glitch, I believe that this may be resolved in iOS 11.1, so once it is released in a week or two, that should fix many of the bugs we've been encountering. In the meantime, if you encounter bugs, keep sending your comments to Apple Accessibility. The more people send them feedback on issues, the more they'll realize the severity and ensure it gets fixed in a future update.

This is the nature of new iOS 1.0 upgrades, there are always bugs. Granted that most of these should have gotten picked up in the beta testing. Although every year when the new version of iOS comes out, there are always bugs. My best recommendation is to folow my tip, especially when a new 1.0 update is available, follow my suggestion to prevent the update to download, and wait until the x.1 update is available. Usually by this point, most of the bugs have been fixed and you'll get a much more solid version. HTH!

Sorry for typos. Not so used to this new braille display editing thing. Wish the old editing mode was still around, but...
 Hi,
I cracked my old iPad running iOS 9.3.5, and I have to say, 4 years of using it was not making me prepared for iOS 11. The glass was already at its breaking point, and without knowing, I pressed the home button to activate Siri, and cracks appeared on the screen various spots, also causing some glass to break. But anyway, my Mom gave me an iPad Mini 2 I think, maybe a 3 or 4.
Anyway, this comment's not about that, it's about my experiences with iOS 11 with my iPad.
Honestly, I have to say, it's ok. However, as you guys stated in the blog, yes, for me, the volume buttons are giving no sound that they are decreasing or increasing.
Also, I've found on the suggestions screen below the dock, that it is a slight bit sluggish. When trying to navigate it, it takes little while to respond.
Also, I've noticed that the My Account button disappears, but I have a solution around that, you can four finger tap at the top of the screen and flick right a few times.
This is only a work around, but it works pretty well on my part.
Hope this helps.

Hey, Wanted to add these bugs in case their not posted.

On google news site with rotor on links, when encountering each link, it reads the links line by line instead of reading entire link, so you have to flick down several times to get through each link.

Also in Safari using item chooser to jump back to a previous spot on a long page, it's not finding items that I know are there, and it jumps out of focus when swiping right or left, then seems to disappear.

Hi all, I am not sure if this can be classed as an accessibility bug but its certainly really annoying and I don't know if its a deliberate change to ios or a bug. I tried reaching out to apple accessibility several days ago, but so far they have been silent.
the bug is as follows, under ios 10 all my apps used to pop up banner notifications when I unlocked my phone no issue they would play a sound, pop up the banner etc. this was really handy as I don't let any apps display notifications on my lock screen.
Now though I have found that if I have the show in history option turned on for any app under notification settings, then when I unlock my phone no banners or sounds play to indicate an event has happened in an app. this is incredibly annoying, as lets say I put my phone down then come back to it a few hours later after doing stuff and go to unlock it, I get nothing to indicate anything has happened in any of my apps unless I either check an apps icon to see if there are any new items. or I must make a point of going into notification center to check it.
But if I disable show in history for any app then it behaves as ios 10 used to, for starters I am not going to go into notifications and disable show in history for over 100 apps individually, secondly lets say its an app like WhatsApp the benefit of having banners show when the phone unlocks and things showing in notification center I could pop into notification center to read what people have said to me without opening WhatsApp and letting them know I was online or have read there messages. so now to get the old behaviour back I have had to sacrifice my way of previewing messages, emails etc.
if my phone is unlocked and a notification happens it displays as a banner regardless of weather the show in history option is enabled or disabled. thanks to this change before I realized how to fix it I did actually miss several WhatsApp messages and other things before I worked out how to fix it, as surely its not just me? I hardly ever bother with notification center unless I am in the situation with messages or WhatsApp I described above. also with banners if you have a lot of messages WhatsApp might show a notification of 6 WhatsApp messages, with having them show in notification center I could see what those 6 messages said now I can't do that without opening the app.

another issue I have noticed is the VoiceOver rotor has a habit of drifting one setting to the right quite often away from the actions setting, where you get things like activate default then flicking down delete etc. in my case this means the rotor sometimes is put on the sounds rotor option rather than the actions item.