Why does iPhone speak when VoiceOver is turned off?

By peter, 21 November, 2017

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

I use VoiceOver with my iPhone 6 all the time.

Sometimes, however, I hand my phone to a sighted person and turn off VoiceOver so that they can use it.

For some reason I have not been able to figure out, when a sighted person enters text into an edit field using the on-screen keyboard, the phone speaks back each word as it is entered. This occurs even when VoiceOver is turned off.

I've written to Apple Accessibility to ask what setting might be responsible but they didn't know and told me to speak to a support specialist.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone on this list knew why this might be happening and what setting is responsible for this. There doesn't seem to be any reason the phone should be speaking with voiceOver turned off and I can't find a setting which might control this.

BTW, this has been happening even prior to iOS 11 on my iPhone 6.

thanks for any ideas.

--Pete

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Comments

By Lielle ben simon on Monday, November 27, 2017 - 05:29

Hi! It's heppands to me to, inorder to stop this go to "settings", "general", "accessibility", "speach", "typing feedback@ and turn it off. It's active as Default.

By peter on Monday, November 27, 2017 - 05:29

For a VoiceOver user, what, if anything, will one miss by turning this feature off? Perhaps this accessibility feature is for non-VoiceOver users who just need some aditional audio feedback?

I'm really just wondering if VoiceOver will still announce that certain words are mis-spelled.

Thanks.

--Pete

By Justin on Monday, November 27, 2017 - 05:29

Hi,
You're not missing anything if you turn it off. It just won't speak when VO is disabled anymore. I think it's mainly for low vision people who might have difficulty with seeing what they're typing, Im not sure

By peter on Monday, November 27, 2017 - 05:29

Thanks for the explanation. I would believe this is for low vision folks and has nothing to do with VoiceOver performance. Now I can confidently turn it off and give sighted users who borrow my phone a more consistent experience!

Interesting when words are spoken with this option turned on and VoiceOver turned off, the speech seems to be very rapid and not very intelligible. I wonder how a person who might want to take advantage of this function can control the voice speed?

--Pete

By Chris on Monday, November 27, 2017 - 05:29

This is an accessibility feature for those with low vision or those who may have other disabilities like dyslexia or other cognitive problems. Go to Setttings>Accessibility>Speech to take a look at them. Adjust the speaking rate slider at the bottom of the screen until it is at a comfortable speech rate for the person that's going to be using these features. You can also select the default voice to be used for each language by choosing the "voices" button. Finally, the pronunciation editor is available so you can customize word pronunciations. I believe this is shared with VoiceOver.