iOS 18.4, macOS 15.4, watchOS 11.4, tvOS 18.4, visionOS 2.4 and other associated betas are now out!

Love that we will have the ability to adjust verbosity so that VO doesn't say button all the time. I've fixed it to the best of my ability, but the way Nathan, and most other voices say button drives me nuts for some reason, so getting rid of that would be nice.

Ha ha, agreed. I actually have a pronunciation dictionary for the word button for the Siri voice 4, US voice. Lol

Nice. I'll of course test macos and depending on what apple did (or not) it could be quick :)
Thank you for continuing this trend guys, we're going to fix it, one bug at a time. Let's go!

As you can see reporting and testing works. time to kill those bugs one at a time.

I didn't notice the list numbering in VoiceOver yet. Ambient music is cool and the new Australian voices sound nice. Currently using Australian Voice 4. Being an iPhone 14 Pro user, I'm still very disappointed that Apple still is not giving us the ChatGPT integration on older devices. I'm hoping that they will eventually do this, but I'm starting to lose faith.

Sorry to tell yu but any phone below 15 pro will not get it. Apple wants people to move to the new phones and the others do not have enough ram for it.

The fact that they actually provide us with about 7 years of software update doesn't meant they have given up on planned obsolescence, like every big company in fact.

I just checked, and the "Always Use Siri Sounds" toggle did appear in VoiceOver Audio settings. Interestingly, on my iPhone 14 Pro, Siri still uses a haptic to let you know it's listening, which I now find a bit annoying. This has been in effect since iOS 17, and this new toggle makes no difference in my case. How weird!

I also miss the snappiness of old Siri.
Side note, the only reason older iPhone models do not have chatGPT integration is because Apple wants to, "encourage", everyone to buy a 15 Pro or newer device. While that is not necessarily good or bad, it is simply what it is, yet I highly doubt Apple could not give older model iPhones the chatGPT portion of Apple Intelligence. It would absolutely not require 8+GB of ram.
I literally have about 5 AI applications on my SE 2022, including ChatGPT. I imagine sooner or later somebody is going to design a shortcut to allow asking Siri to pull results from that, or another AI app.

Which kind of proves my point that this, could, have been done officially, if not for Apple's desire to have us all with the latest model devices.

Ok, yep, I really did get pulled back in. It does seem stable so far though, which is a massive plus.
I wonder if at any point, an option for turning off the numbers in lists will be added. It’s quite strange after using iPhone for so long, it’s good they added it, though, and I think people can make use of it, but sometimes an option would be nice. Maybe even to have it in the rotor, then you can use it depending on what web content you think you'll need to use it for

I'd like to have distinct sounds for buttons, etc. also. But having more options is always nice.

Thanks for your info.
I've wait to control the verbosity like it set in Jaws or NVDA.
I like that the screen reader reads the content before the control.
It's a welcome change.
I hope it will be improve in the future.

Witch Apple intelegence languages support in this beta?
Hebrew is there?

So I’ve noticed that now every time I use the back tap feature, VoiceOver speaks “Back tap, double tap detected” or “Back tap, triple tap detected”.
For the love of all that is holy, why would they think that is a good idea? Well meaning over verbosity, sigh.

Dave, it seems to be Apple's current trend. Fits right in with "clickable" and "writing tools in action menu", distracting announcements that pull you right out of the task at hand.

It harkens back to the 1980s, when my blind mother got her first talking clock. She would press a button and it would emit an annoying beep, pause, announce, "the time is," pause again, and finally announce the time, which is all anyone would really need to hear.

I don't mind such extra announcements, I simply wish they could be controlled using the existing VoiceOver verbosity controls.

Could things be better? Sure but always being negative and not giving credit where it is do is rediculous!!!! If you want to see something enhanced such as the ability to turn off announcements for actions for writing tools after every beta comes out go back into your original feedback and say this isn't fixed as of build 1234. Keep doing that. If you don't consistently they don't know it is an issue for you.
They did an awesome job!!!!!!!!!!

I know nothing about the structure of the OS code. But I can infer some things from the development we all are seeing.

Apparently, it's easy to make VoiceOver announce some unnecessary phrase that adds no new functionality.

It seems to be a bit more difficult to do that in a way that integrates with past design decisions, which is why these new frivolous announcements don't interact with verbosity or speech hints.

Most difficult of all appears to be modifying old code to fix long-standing bugs.

As a retired software developer, I think it's safe to say that these are clear symptoms of the agile software engineering strategy. At the time when agile development first started being a thing, these were exactly the types of issues that detractors warned of.

Dennis, this is a forum where people are perfectly entitled to, and indeed encouraged to, express opinions, good and bad. It is not a church where we must simply worship at the alter of Apple. And honestly, even Apple wouldn't want or expect that. They hold themselves to high standards, and so should we as paying customers. So please stop trying to police everyone whenever they say anything remotely critical, or say they don't like a feature.
I've been on this site a long time, and have always strived to be fair and balanced, and have given plenty of well deserved praise. I think VoiceOver is fantastic. On this occasion, they added something I don't like, so I shared that for discussion on the forum. I don't think it's fair to say I'm always negative.
And don't assume that because someone has posted here, that they haven't also filed a feedback report to Apple. I have done. I've been beta testing for a long time and don't need lecturing.

I don't think the problem is with agile - it's to do with not having automated testing in place. If you read about extreme programming and agile practices they are all about testing all the time, deploying all the time and making sure you don't break things because you expect them to change rapidly. The problem is that Apple doesn't have a good test suite for VoiceOver so they can never be sure if they are breaking things. Likely none of the devs who work on VoiceOver now have much idea of the history and reasoning behind how it works.

But done correctly, there is nothing wrong with agile in my opinion. However, the problems start when people cherry picks the parts they want to do and don't do it in a responsible manner.

Having said that, I think VoiceOver is also harmed because a lot of the functionality has no clearly defined way of working. Take VO+J as an example. We know what we want from it, but it is very unclear if its intended purpose was anything like that.

Hey Paul. That's an interesting thought. In my own work life, I remember working with UI and UX teams on screen reader support for an app one time, and they had a lot of this additional unnecessary verbosity. This was purely born of making assumptions about what blind people needed, and was very well intentioned. We discussed it and remedied it, and everyone was happy.
Of course there's no one size fits all, which is why it's great to see Apple continuing to add verbosity options year over year. This one, and some of the writing tools stuff you mention, though feels like a slip up to me, unless they are accompanied by options to change them.
I'm in the EU, so have only got Apple Intelligence now in this beta. I've yet to play with the writing tools. I don't beta test Mac though.
Dave

I've found over the years a lot of users will complain and not file feedback to companies. If feedback isn't sent they can't fix it. Is that everyone? Of course not. But it is more the majority then not. I've told people on public releases that have issues if it isn't working as expected I suggest calling apple accessibility or emailing them and most of the time the response is I don't want to do all that. that is where I was going It wasn't intended at any one user. For the record I agree there should be verbosity options so the user can customize it as they wish. Some people may need to know it is there because they are or they just like to hear it. Others don't want to hear that. There is nothing wrong with either way. They should have the choice. I also say companies should get positive feedback because it can help encourage them to keep doing better and it is appreciated. Everyone likes to know their hard work is paying off and helping users.

Great points about agile development, Mr. Grieves. I agree it's quite likely that developers don't know what they're breaking if they don't test. They could do that with a test suite. They might also consider actually using VoiceOver on a daily basis as their primary UI, which would produce testing as a side-effect. If Apple took monitors away from their developers, I imagine we'd see a lot of nit-picky usability issues vanish in a release or two.

Remember everyone, this is the first beta of 18.4. Things will change. Believe that.

I just heard from a YouTube video by Brandon Butch that sighted people are also getting a banner pop-up at the top of the screen when iPhone has detected a double or triple tap on the back of your phone, so this isn't necessarily a VoiceOver issue.

I agree with Dave Nason, @Dennis Long, if someone like João Santos who is probably one of the most clever developer on this site, has more or less stopped filing feedbacks and that he even just attempted to create vosh, it means that VO also has serious problems that aren't being fixed, and so is their feedback system. Look at carrie on accessibility video about the vision pro. Just because it's based on the voiceover in ios/ipados it literally have more features on paper than the macos screen reader, and I'd bet that a major part of this feature set certainly works better than the limitted set of macos's. I have been doing exactly what you said, report after each micro beta update on feedbacks from an year ago that it's not been fixed or implemented yet and 9/10 of my feedbacks as well as accessibility@apple seem to be in a blackhole. While I am happy and proud to report, and certainly more users should do that, just fyi all, the french translation of vo on the mac is incredibly bad to the point of it's genuinely impossible to understand what said translation is if we are not familiar with the original in english. Just as an example, on the mac, when we interact in some element it say "in, element", which is translate appropriately in french. However, for "out of, element", it says "en provenance de", which mean "out of" translated literally but in fact that is more in the sense of "she came out of nowhere". Braille display as well has been translated for a long time as "écran braille", which could also mean "braille display" on paper but hte literal backward translation would be "braille screen". Or yet my favorite, you know on ios the verbosity options? In french this is still shown as "débit" which can mean rate like in speech rate, the flow of watter "débit d'eau", or just the english debit itself, and neither of those make any sense. Reported.
So yes, I also tell my friend in my circle that if you don't report previously, you are not allowed to complain if you actually have the skill set to report, which most of them do. Harsh? Maybe. But I know that my fundamental idea is good. But when a company doesn't even listen to feedbacks written after x amount of unpaid labor, I think complaining especially on the most recognized blind resource for said company, in a constructive way of course, is completely deserved, and in our right to do so.
See this little thread here. https://www.applevis.com/blog/apple-releases-ios-1831-ipados-1831-ipados-1775-macos-sequoia-1531-watchos-1131
Anyways. I've updated my iphone and watch, not my mac yet, and so far I haven't seen any major problem but for one: I don't remember if it was already there on 18.3.1, but basically each time with braille screen input when I write a space after a dot (.) VO announces space, space, twice. But I am not sure if it's because of the beta of if it was already there.

I guess that this is a good news for everyone then.
We still have traces of the horrible mess with capslock key in some random macos apps with voiceover. And recently whatsapp for me which wasn't there before.

Oh that is very interesting if it’s a visual thing too. I’d love to know the thought process behind it. Seems daft to me.

According to Brandon Butch, it seems Apple did this to avoid confusion. Apparently some users were activating back tap by accident and then wondering why certain actions were being taken. I made the mistake of setting up Be My Eyes to call a volunteer with a double tap on the back of my phone, which set off unintentionally at 6:55 AM whilst I was still sleeping. Now, the back tap banner serves to alert all users that back tap was detected to avoid unnecessary confusion.

Interesting. Well at least there is a thought process. I still don’t like it though, so hope they’ll let us turn it off.

I agree with you issues need to be resolved. I do agree the Mac needs to be like Voiceover on the iPhone.

I've just reported it.

So, just keeping tabs on pointless and purely cosmetic announcements, we're now up to four: The backtap announcement, the ring mode / silent mode announcement on the volume buttons, the clickable announcement in Chromium browsers, and the writing tools announcement. Let me know if I've missed anything.

So quick caveat that I don't have the beta myself, however, it looks like on Apple Intelligence capable devices, the same Siri voices can now be used with VoiceOver. They were upgraded when Apple Intelligence was released, and now VoiceOver can take advantage of them as well. I wonder if other languages besides US English are supported, or if they're still stuck on the really old Versions based on concatenation.

I wonder why something as simple as the siri voice upgrade is tied into Apple Intelligence. It just seems kinda silly, really. I'm really starting to dig this new iPhone 16e; I hardly even use LIDAR anyway.

The reason why is because these new voices are based on language models and require a sufficient amount of RAM to run correctly. They will technically work on older devices, however, all iPhones before the 15 Pro had either four or 6 GB of RAM, and as you use more apps on the device, that memory will start to fill up and iOS will not be able to optimize well. Apple focuses on these details because you don't want a situation where you're using your phone with this voice and it suddenly slows down or crashes due to running out of RAM.

Try deleting all Siri voices in Settings, then turn off Siri for a few minutes and then reenable, see if that forces a refresh. The voice list is just an XML the Settings app reads from to know what voices are available, and sometimes that can take a little while to be updated. Deleting the old voice files as well may show new versions with different sizes. I believe the LLM variance are around 230 MB or so.

Interesting that there are yet again new Siri voice improvements. Seems like they do that every couple years with a new version of iOS. lol

When they added the neural voices a few years back, I tried them with VO but didn't like them, and couldn't really tell a difference between them and the old ones, except for the way smaller size. lol You could try changing your region and then deleting the Siri voices for your primary one and then switch it back, restart your phone and see if the bigger LLM voices show up. I haven't tried this since the PB isn't out yet, but I think that's what I did to get of the neural Siri voices I didn't want taking up space on my phone.

Whether I do a double back tap or a triple, vo says back tap, double tap detected no matter if it's 2 or 3.

I'm very curious about this. For Siri, I use the male Irish voice; it's been my voice of choice ever since it became available. I understand that the AI version of voices outside the US isn't necessarily a reality yet, but I'm curious about the difference between the AI voices and the ones we already had. I use Vocalizer Nathan on all of my Apple devices so that I can have a consistent experience everywhere; use Nathan in JAWS as well. Anyway, I'd love to hear the AI voices; might be worth losing that continuity I've been preferring if the voices are noticeably better. I guess I can check Siri settings to see what I can find.

Are these AI voices available on macOS? I installed 15.4 on my m4 Mini, but it's still using the older voice model. DO I need to change my region, delete the voice, and then change it back?

Hi guys, here are my own thoughts on the new beta so far.
First and foremost, it's great to have Apple Intelligence finally working with more languages. Now I can switch my phone back to German and not have to miss out on any new AI features. My biggest annoyance personally is that Apple has still not addressed the fact that Siri voices can only read characters out at 50% speech rate. Unfortunately I really love the German Siri voices, and had it not been for this issue, I would have continued to use them. I don't care if it's a feature or a bug; I really wish it'd be addressed in some way.
New VO enhancements are nice; not anything I'd dabble with myself, but I'm sure glad they're here either way.

FYI, nice people remember the beta is in Letter S. Normally another beta would be out in 2 weeks but with this it might be next week. Think Apple wants to release the iOS 18.4 in April. Probably close to the end.

For those testing mac os... Has the dock bug been fixed, or its still ongoing?

The pull to refresh, probly got that wrong but anyway it’s kinda annoying, I like how it was before

The position in a list being spoken I like, it works the same as talkback now, speaking of it just got a small update adding hid support for braille displays