Here Is Apple Accessibility's Latest Statement On The iOS Focus Bug

Mostly we know, we will fix it, thanks for letting us know.

I've not had this focus bug, apart from maybe in safari, but i'm not sure, navigating on that app is kind of a nightmare anyway.

I think some of this stuff is a device by device thing, which really isn't good.

I'm sticking with IOS for now but I do understand why people might move to Android.

Lucky me no issues even when I was using 12 pro. Next year when I get 15 pro max or 16 pro will see.

Thanks, Bruce, for sharing your reply. I hope they really do fix this annoying bug!

I've noticed this issue a lot on Mac OS, but tbh I'm not bothered by it since I can use navigation commands such as headings and form fields to get around it. I'm still on my trusty and awesome iPhone 7, and occasionally run into this issue. It has happened more frequently as of late, and when it occurs in Mail I have to backtrack a bit. Sometimes this can get pretty time-consuming. But other than that I've had no trouble. As great as these devices and people are, I don't think I'd want the accessibility job. It's a big one, and tbh it just seems like a lot of Apple users are complaining about petty issues. I feel sorry for the accessibility teams who constantly have to repeat themselves by saying that they are working on solving these things. It's frustrating for all of us, but I think a bit of gratitude goes a long way. Not that gratitude hasn't been expressed by others, but just saying. But perhaps that is just me.

While it’s great that you haven’t been inconvenienced too much by bugs in iOS. Others are finding their phones unusable for certain basic tasks and highly frustrating for others. That is not a petty issue in my view. I believe gratitude and thanks should be given where deserved however leaving bugs around for an entire version cycle that impede basic functionality is nothing to be grateful for. I’ll be very grateful once iOS is a fully functional OS for blind users but that seems a long way off at the moment. Safari is an unmitigated disaster zone, and that is most definitely basic functionality of any OS. Many other apps have problems but safari is my most problematic. If safari was as problematic for the sighted user, it wouldn’t be shipped. If it was they’d be losing users and rightly so. So no, I won’t be grateful for a sub standard OS that frequently means I can’t perform basic tasks and has resulted in me losing trust in my ability to get anything done without major frustration. When apple can ship an OS that enables my £1300 phone to perform the tasks it should be able to do, I’ll be extremely grateful and continue showing apple my gratitude with large amounts of money. If that doesn’t happen this year. I’ll show Google a little gratitude instead.

I often wish that the fixing of accessibility bugs by Apple didn't have to wait for general iOS updates. Would be nice if more frequent intermittent updates could be provided to fix the accessibility bugs. I use JAWS on Windows and am used to the fixing of accessibility bugs not always being tied to Windows OS updates.

In general, most of these accessibility bugs won't be found until after an update to iOS comes out and lots more people have been using it. Then it is frustrating to have to wait until the next general update for these bugs to be addressed.

Anyway, that would be my suggestion to Apple in order to relieve some of this frustration.

--Pete

As always, it’s important to try to reset your settings once in a while. This sometimes resolves issues. It doesn’t always resolve issues. But it is worth a try. And I believe that people will like the fall release of iOS 17. So in a month or so, people will find out if the focus issue resolves or not. As it stands, iOS 17, beta six is very stable, and there are no focus issues that I could detect.

Keep in mind that advertisements also can contribute to focus issues. It could be valuable to install an ad blocking software, such as ad guard or add block.

Have you had a lot of luck with ad blockers stopping focus jumping constantly. It seems to me it’s not just ads but twitter and other social media elements, especially in websites and news articles. Realistically iOS should be able to handle those elements without losing focus but as it can’t what would you recommend as the best solution? I’ve recently been able to stop the Screen curtain on VO crashing bug by deleting enough content from my phone that its under 40% full. I don’t know why that worked but at least the many many crashes per minute are gone now after months. I’m still getting focus jumps but they are obviously a separate bug to the VO crash bug. It’s still highly annoying and completely unacceptable but better than the phone being completely impossible to do the simplest tasks on so a slight improvement. I’d really appreciate your input on what works for you with ad blocking. I’ve tried a few but never achieved the affect I’m looking for which is that focus moves on to the next element following the ad.

I use AdGuard Pro. And I’ve been using it for a couple of years. Fundamentally, it gets rid of a lot of ads that you might find on screen. As a hole, I’m not having focus. Q issues. Add sent to be a major factor in an accessibility on web pages, applications, etc. Add blockers that work system wide tend to be really good. There’s a little bit of tweaking required once you install the app. But it is fully accessible and works very well.

Thanks very much. I remember playing around with ad blockers years ago but maybe during a phone upgrade I didn’t enable one and have just stayed like that since. If you don’t mind spending a few minutes more on this, what settings have you found to work best? I’ve enabled the app but there appear to be various lists which I can choose from? Is that the primary important setting to get right? Do I need to change anything in the DNS settings? Which list do you use? Thanks so much for any hel you are able to offer. Do you also find this removes the social media content that breaks focus continuity?

I'm starting to get the impression that bugs like the focus with VO are some sort of flaw in the individual devices. Bad areas on a RAM chip maybe? I guess you would have to get the same model of phone and clone it to test this.

I am very much not re-assured by that. Apologies for continuously making this reference but do you think for a single solitary nano second that a sighted person would accept their phone being this fundamentally broken and the last word on the issue is check out the new version of iOS now F*** off. In fact, I need to re-read that email because as I’m writing this and focus is jumping to the preview button. I’m seriously F***ing angry at that flippant an attitude to something thats caused me so much frustration misery and stress on a device I have spent £1300 in an ecosystem I’ve spent north of £50k in. Seriously angry. If thats the best they’ve got then F*** them!

First no company is going to comment on something that isn't out so get happy in the same pants you got pissed off in.

I believe Ash means resetting settings. I did try this in the effort to stop focus jumping bug and VO crashing bug. Sadly it didn’t fix either. Might still be worth a go though if you haven’t done it in many years. TBH it didn’t improve anything on my phone for about an hour or 2 of work but I don’t think thats a reason to not try it. You may have better results. As I said elsewhere, I have finally managed to get rid of the VO crashing bug by deleting content from my phone until it was under 40% full. This didn’t fix the focus jumping bug but at least it was an improvement to fix the VO crashing bug. All I had to do was accept a phone with about 102GB of storage instead of the 256GB I actually paid for. Good deal. /s I can’t tell you how much that email from Apple has wound me up. I can’t leave right now because of my contract but if I could I would. Apple are in serious danger of losing significant numbers of customers over their attitude problem. These bugs are serious. The impact they have on our ability to get simple things done in serious and that was not a serious answer from a serious company.

I don't have an IPhone 15 but do have the latest version of IOS, not the beta, and the only issue I've really come across is VO deciding to switch off the speech.

If I were you, i'd go to o2 or whatever shop you're with and see if you can try out another phone and explain this issue to them. Maybe they will be able to do something for you if you show them that the phone isn't very usable.

Android has issues but you might want to also look into those phones.

Also £50000? Wow. I think apple is alright but i don't think i've ever spent £50000 in my entire life on tech.

I've not had this jumping issue but I have had an issue where the headphone port messed up and when I bought a new IPhone it worked fine.

Are you the only one with this jumping issue?

This is a public beta so no need for secrecy. If they’ve fixed the serious ongoing problems then the respectful and proper thing to do would be to say so. I am personally done with betas because of so many serious bugs even in end of cycle software however given the nature of your response, You are either being flippant and obnoxious or you know for definite that the focus bugs are fixed. Please could I ask you, if you do know they are fixed, I mean if you had them and now don’t have them. Would you mind letting me know so I can get happy in those previously mentioned pissy pants. I’d really love it if you were saying that from a position of knowledge instead of a position of something less substantial. I’ll go get the public beta today if someone can tell me it fixes the problems I need fixing. I don’t mind dealing with other minor irritations and small bugs but the focus bugs being squashed would make my life much easier. Thanks.

You might be right but I don’t fancy spending £30 on taxis to be told wait for the new OS. This is all just not good enough from a company the size of Apple but we are where we are. As for the money I’ve spent. I bet you’d be surprised if you added up how much you have spent with them. For me it’s well north of £50k possibly heading toward £60. 12 phones, 3 mac mini’s, 5 iPads, 2 iMacs, at least 6 MacBook Pro’s, at least 8 Apple TV’s, all the other bits and bobs I can’t remember including AirPods etc. plus over £25k in iTunes content over the last 15 years. It all adds up over time.

You could call O2 or whatever shop you're with and explain yourself and then go there to see what they say, they might give you a new phone.

It's up to you, if it were me; i'd do it but my o2 shop is about 15 minutes away by car so about 5 or so pounds with uber.

And nah, i've spent around i'd say, 5000, maybe, max. I've only bought phones from apple.

I did have a mac once but my auntie bought that for me and I payed her back and moved back to windows.

I have an iPhone XR running iOS 16.6.
Yes, the focus bug is here and VoiceOver restarts all the time.
My main VO voice is Norwegian SIRI 1 and for English I use UK SIRI 2 and US SIRI 4.
When I use US SIRI 4 Vo is nearly constantly restarting and makes my phone unusable.
It looks like switching to compact voices helps a lot and I've rarely have VO restart with compact voices.
However, those voices are simply very bad quality thus makes it hard to understand what VO reads to me.

I have been having a similar experience with my 14 Pro Max for months now. Restarting would temporarily help a little but wasn’t a fix. The only fix I found was from other peoples comments saying delete data from your phone until you are under 50% full. I had to go down to almost 40% but now I never have the VO restarting, screen curtain on bug. I still have focus jumping around but at least the VO restart has been fixed. It’s a rediculous fix considering I literally spent money to have that memory available that I now have to leave empty in order to fix a bug but at least it works. Sorry you have been having as many problems as you have. It is just not good enough and being ignored for such a long time makes it worse. I really wish someone would give a concrete answer about whether iOS 17 fixes the focus bug but so far nobody has which is very concerning.

Hope I have the sane luck when I put 17 in my 13 pro. No issues with focus or restarting. Even the issue with call where VO stop working is history. Hope it will continue. For me it was 13 and because I call it unlucky 13 people were all over me stating it was a good iOS. For those with issue hope it get better for you.

I would recommend this practice. Yeah, yeah, Apple says you don't need to but we use apps and tech that require more memory to operate. If you're not using an app, close it from the app switcher. I have found that multiple apps opened bogs down the device.

No focus issues on iPhone SE with iOS 17.

Hi Dennis. Thanks for that but I have a feeling we’ve been here before. You weren’t having the focus bug before installing iOS 17 were you? If you were then not having it now is really useful information but I think I remember this exact conversation happening before and you saying no you didn’t have it before which means its meaningless that you aren’t getting it now. Did I remember wrong? If you were getting the bugs and now not with iOS 17. Thats useful information. Otherwise not so much.

There’s so many factors that play. Some of the people using these phones have shaky hands. They have difficulty with keeping their fingers in one place. They aren’t paying attention to where they’re touching. They barely know how to use voiceover. Sometimes there are really bugs. And then sometimes they’re stubborn people who say they don’t go through something. Usually it’s because they’re not paying attention enough to notice that there is a bug. I think the problem is that this website allows everybody to interact with everybody. There’s no differentiation between novice or intermediate or advanced. It’s just a big mishmash of criticisms judgments and defensiveness. People that barely know how to use their phone or talking about getting on Betas. They can’t even find a simple setting to turn on or off; and yet they want to install a beta. There are language issues. There are cognitive issues. There are people that are massively stubborn. And there are people who attack after getting help. I wish this website would let us filter people out based on skill level. There could be a test of some kind that assesses a persons ability to use these devices, and then we could either decide to interact with everyone, or some people, or only people in our skill level. It gets so frustrating coming on this website. It’s just complaint after Response after complaint after response after unintelligible rant.

People are screaming and yelling about wanting to know if iOS 17 has focus issues. People respond and say no there are no focus issues. And yet the response is your opinion doesn’t matter. Then why even ask?

All I was asking for was the single piece of information that makes Dennis’s comment that he isn’t experiencing focus bugs relevant to my circumstances. In your haste to criticise others you may have failed to be the ambassador of competence you clearly think yourself. I’m pretty sure Dennis and I have had this conversation before and sadly he hadn’t been experiencing the bugs prior to installing the beta. As for the rest of your diatribe, please refer to my subject line. I’m most certainly not going to spend time outlining my competence and experience more than to say they are sufficient to know whether focus jumping is my fault or a bug.

I don’t understand where you are coming from

As for me, i’ve had the is this you on iOS 16, but luckily not iOS 17 I haven’t had this focus issue on iOS 17 but I’ve had it on 16

I actually laughed at reading your comment. Thats the single most helpful thing from my point of view that you’ve written on this site. You are now the second person to say this directly. I think I’m going to bite the bullet and install the public beta. I’d really appreciate just one more comment saying it fixed the focus bug for them but either way, I think you tipped the scale to going to risk it. While typing this message, focus has jumped 3 times. The phone is 20cm from my leg and I’m typing on a Bluetooth keyboard. As far as I’m aware, my hands are rock solid but I’m slightly concerned I need to go to the doctor based on ashes observations that shaky hands are likely the cause of my issues with iOS. If I can cover the 40cm to my phones screen without even realising it, thats one hell of a shaky hand. I wonder if it’s Ash’s time of the month?

Yes, I definitely had the focus issue both on an iPhone and an iPad iOS, and my hands do not shake in the slightest unless I’m really stressed,
I want to Clee, my iPad which are used for school crashed a few times today when I used it, it definitely is a pain,
Before installing to be to make sure that you’re back up

Of course backed up. ITunes and iCloud. I’m not too worried about the occasional crash. It’s the hundreds and hundreds of focus jumps per day that are what has caused me to lose trust in my iPhone. My iPad Pro doesn’t have the focus problem so that can stay on iPad OS 16 for now. No reason to risk making it less reliable than it is right now which is pretty good.

Long time sufferer of the focus issue here.

I've consistently seen this behavior on an iPhone 12, 12 Pro, 14, and 14 Pro. I mostly use Alex as my VoiceOver voice, but have encountered this issue when briefly using other voices. For me, the issue has been system-wide, in that it can present itself in any app or area of iOS.

I've been testing iOS 17 since the first developer release, and have seen no discernible improvement to the frequency of VoiceOver focus spontaneously jumping.

Note that I've performed a reset of all settings a number of times - both before and since installing the iOS 17 beta. This has resolved some other issues that I've encountered, but not the focus one.

I'm envious of those who have never encountered this problem or have seen it go away with iOS 17. My own experience suggests that not everybody should expect to see the issue resolved with iOS 17.

I am downloading the beta right now but I’m going to delete it thanks to your comment. I would accept the minor annoyances with a public beta to get rid of the focus bugs but I’m not going to risk introducing new bugs while not being sure I’ll get rid of the really problematic one. Sorry you are having these problems too. Like you, I’ve reset all settings, emptied my app switcher and restarted my phone multiple times a day. The only thing I’ve successfully been able to stop is the VO crashing bug by only having 40% available storage filled. I had to delete a lot to get down that low and it’s frustrating because theres no reason I can think of that would mean I need 150GB free. No swap file is that large without an underlying bug in memory management which Apple have had plenty of time to fix.

I've been using VoiceOver with iOS for years and never encountered this focus issue.

Has anyone actually worked out what conditions need to be in place for the bug to occur?

Someone experiencing the issue should probably lodge a support case with Apple. I know from a completely unrelated support case that they can extract a lot of logging information to help in tracking down bugs, which they can then forward to their software engineering department.

Multiple people have done it time and time and time and time again, but Apple does absolutely nothing to report, all the fires, I was going to for you, don’t you worry about it, Apple just keeps on sending the default email but we will send it to High management, etc. Time and time again,, this is so annoying. And you know what so annoying. Apple has made this issue so bad it’s not in People, including myself have considered going to android

How do I know it’s several people who have been planning on going to android because of how bad this issue is
I personally am extremely annoyed with this issue, and I’m extremely annoyed at her Apple has taken this issue.
So the more, the fact that android devices don’t have this issue, considering such an Apple People does the android and talk back in general is the creepiest operating system and screen reader ever
People have considered going to Adelaide, and that’s absolutely annoying considering certain people from the android is really bad, when in actuality if you got the device with the right hardware it’s actually good operating system
I’m not saying that Apple is bad, I have been with Apple for nearly all of my 13 years of existence, since like 2015, 2016, my first iPhone with the 5C running iOS 9.3.5, Those memories so good, until I locked myself out
Apple is good in someways. I liked the clothes look at it, I like some of the voices I like that I can use eloquent,, and just drop iOS completely

So I believe you asked him if the issue was occurring on iOS 17. He said no it doesn’t occur on iOS 17. And then you shot it down. And then the comments after that wereliterally more of the same. People clinging to one phrase and getting immediately defensive. As I said. Multiple factors. Everybody on this website uses these phones and devices so differently. Some are novices. Some are intermediate. Some are very advanced. But the website demands that we just jump into the pool together. And I wish that there was an option so that I could filter out comments that are more focused on a basic user asking for basic troubleshooting. Sometimes peoples hands do shake. Some of the time, people do not and cannot touch the same part of the screen twice. There is literally an accessibility feature for that. Sometimes it is a bug. Sometimes it’s a language barrier. Sometimes it’s a cognitive issue. There are a lot of factors in play in terms of people using accessibility. It is very important to remember that. so when somebody starts hollering about a bug they had experienced for years, and then somebody else says I’ve never had that issue, and then somebody says blah blah blah, and then somebody provides feedback and a resolution, and then there’s criticism, and then there’s defensiveness, and then there’s more of the same, I start getting frustrated and question the validity of the whole conversation. Because when it comes down to it, most of the people on this website would rather talk about how frustrated they are then bring up solutions. My solution may not be the solution. But at least I provided one. I mentioned AdGuard Pro. I believe that adds to play a role in focus jumping around. I specifically use AdGuard Pro. Others challenged that because they’re saying they’ve done it for years and the focus issues persist. And they don’t talk about if they’ve actually used AdGuard Pro. I use StopTheFonts app. Because it creates a more uniform font appearance on all websites. That can also play a role in focus jumping around. I use StoptheMadness app. I have literally invested hundreds and maybe thousands of dollars in testing and assessing how to live with, and hopefully get rid of Bugs. Obviously apples not doing the best job at it. Even though they have made quite a bit of progress in iOS 17. There are still many issues. Right now, my biggest frustration is how Safari keeps refreshing the page on certain websites. Especially websites where I have filled out a form. My other frustration is how moving apps is very problematic on the home screen. My other frustration is how editing PDFs and other documents is so problematic across iOS and iPadOS and macOS.

Ash, your comment is about the most Patrician contribution I have ever read. no, that does not mean that I think your name is Patricia, or that you express opinions similar to someone named Patricia. I claim the right to deploy the said adjective on account of having done rather splendidly in A-level Latin back in the year 2000 - and any of you who disagrees with me must therefore show that you have at least a BA in classics before your disagreement can be viewed as legitimate. Seriously, classes of people? Idiots to geeks? Let's just let everyone express opinions and make of them what we will.

Now, this Voiceover crashing/loss of focus bug is wretched wretched wretched. I am not a novice. I do know how to play with settings. I do know how to remove items from app switcher. I do know how to delete items from my phone so I'm only using a fraction of its storage - why should I have to do that? I do not have trembling hands or other motor issues - but so what if I did? What else do I have or not have? Not sure, but that's enough to be going on with. My point is this: my opinion is that it's wretched and I do hope they fix it. Sounds like they have for IOS 17 (thanks, Dominic).

You said

Ash, your comment is about the most Patrician contribution I have ever read. no, that does not mean that I think your name is Patricia, or that you express opinions similar to someone named Patricia. I claim the right to deploy the said adjective on account of having done rather splendidly in A-level Latin back in the year 2000 - and any of you who disagrees with me must therefore show that you have at least a BA in classics before your disagreement can be viewed as legitimate. Seriously, classes of people? Idiots to geeks? Let's just let everyone express opinions and make of them what we will.

Well thank goodness I have headphones, because if I didn’t have them I would’ve laughed my ass off
But I completely agree with you, Doug. This focus issue is ““ wretched wretched wretched what’s up this is no San Francisco means that your name is Doug, VoiceOver is just being an absolute crazy head right now.
Screw your VoiceOver, before I literally use the photo spoke to come on go do you mean why the hell am I bothering all the screaming the hell am I arguing with one
I am wasting my time
But in all seriousness this VoiceOver focus issue is really really really really annoying
Voice of a jumping is really bad dictation is really bad everything is just going downhill to be quite honest Thomas voiceover and dictation are absolutely terrible

Ash, If you followed the thread you’d have noticed, all I was looking for was whether Dennis had previously experienced this bug. To claim I was shooting him down is disingenuous. I was just trying to find out if his experience of not having the bug is relevant to my circumstances. As for the elitist ideas, I wouldn’t want to be a part of that type of site. I understand that people are by their nature, human. They are allowed levels of ability and to express frustration without judgement. Sometimes life is frustrating. An example of this that’s relevant to our discussion is if you put something in a place and hundreds of times a day, it moved to another place without any rhyme or reason, add on top of that that you have no way of seeing where its gone and the easiest way to get it back to where you put it. It’s as annoying as JAWS just stopping talking multiple times a day for no reason. That particular issue, I was able to fix by giving JAWS higher priority to the CPU but the focus bug, I haven’t been able to fix for months now. Very frustrating.

Bingo, Thanks for allowing me to find a new word. I like it.

Ash, if you want levels like you seam to then work in an apple shop or something. this site is for everyone.

I understand you're frustrated that people seam to be going round in circles, that's what i'm getting from your posts, but this is how this site works.

The thing is, I could be the most experty expert in the world when it comes to apple and not experience this bug. I've not experienced it once and am using an IPhone 13. I'm quite sure this is device spesific.

Andy going back to the entire shop thing, would they let you test an IPhone with the exact same moddle number, to see if it happens there too? I honestly don't know as the phones in most places are demos but you could ask and asee what happens.

First time I heard the consumer getting blame for focus issues. Wow. Maybe Apple will check this and agree with those who have problem with hands and not having a ferm hand.

Brad, how would you answer this?

Andy, I am glad to have furnished you with an adjective of Roman origins; but please don't have a pop at the elitists writ large. As you yourself mmight say, it's a funny word that one, isn't it? People have a go at Oxford University for being elite - what's wrong with academically elite? Sporting elite? Truth is I went to an Oxford college and yes, you had to be bloody good to get into Oxford but I was surrounded by state school kids and people from all over the dear old world. Nothing wrong with that.

Anyway, I do think there should be a new feature - Applevis b***h-fight of the week. This would be right up there.

Lol, that really should be. It would make the community more enjoyable, and what about a boxing match too. Singer versus Andy, or dentist versus Ash? Who knows, who knows. Lol