What’s the best way to report voice-over bugs to Apple

By Ipadman, 17 February, 2021

Forum
Accessibility Advocacy

So I’ve noticed a few bugs recently, when using dictation to enter text then swiping back through it by character or word, sometimes voice-over won’t read out what has just been inserted, and you have to leave the text field and re-enter it in order to edit it properly. The other issue is with the desktop version of the Google website, I prefer the desktop version because I find it easier to navigate and it gives me all the results I need, but recently I can’t get past the cookie message Google has on its website for users in the EU, the reason why I think this might be an Apple issue and not a Google one is that my iPhone runs iOS 13, and I don’t have any problems there.
What is the best way to report these voice-over bugs to Apple?

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By Duncan Babbage on Monday, April 5, 2021 - 12:29

I'm just an iOS developer, and don't represent Apple in any way, but I know a little about this which may help. The mechanism for filing bug reports to Apple these days is via the Feedback Assistant website or app.

A little known trick is that the Feedback Assistant app is actually available under-the-hood on all iOS devices these days, even though you only see it from Springboard (the app launcher) if you're running an iOS Beta. To launch the app, you just visit the url applefeedback:// from the iOS device. The same link also launches the Feedback Assistant app on macOS. You have to sign in with an AppleID and password—the one you use for App Store purchases. But that's the way to make an official bug report to Apple.

You can also log into the web version of the Feedback Assistant from any browser to submit bug reports.

The experience of most people is that once these bugs are submitted, it's quite likely you won't hear anything back—or that it will take a long time before you get a reply. However, we are also told that these reports do make a difference and Apple encourages us to submit them. I know that the Accessibility Team at Apple is passionate about their work and would certainly love to hear from you on these issues.

For what it's worth, it may not be as useful to submit a bug report if you've seen it on iOS 13, and haven't been able to verify that the bug is still present on the current iOS 14. Again, I don't speak for Apple but given the volume of submissions they get I am guessing it is possible that reports that are about an older version of the operating system may get less attention than ones seen on iOS 14. To that end, one way to address this might be to make a 'screen recording' of what you're experiencing when you encounter the bug. If you posted that here, someone else could perhaps try and do the same thing on iOS 14 for you and see if they still encounter it? Appreciate this might feel like a lot of work though. :)