What's happening with voiceover and volume control across the whole ecosystem?

By TheBllindGuy07, 17 October, 2024

Forum
Apple Beta Releases

Sorry for this maybe short and confusing posts, I don't have any idevice handy to copy paste the fb# here.
But basically I've been having volume control bugs with voiceover on my watch, iphone and mac on the latest betas, and for the mac on the stable as well.
On the watch and iphone, the granularity has been zoomed 5x or 10x, we apparently have more fine control. Too much fine control. On my watch se2 for example to go from 0 to 100% volume with the double tap then swipe up/down gesture, before I could easily do it in one shot, now I need about two or three from botom to top.
On iphone, the volume rotor control has also about the same issue where it's no longer a 5% increment or decrement but weird percentage ish and it's also became just slower.
On the mac ever since the dev beta cycle of sequoia until the stable of 15.0 and the latest beta of 15.1, somewhere in the release cycle the trackpad gesture cmd rotor left rotor right for volume just broke and I can only go from 100% to 95% for example and not further, or 75-70%... without really knowing if it actually changed the volume as the difference is so small.
I am just confused about how different mechanisms on different os to control volume with voiceover suddenly stopped working more or less around the same time. Are you also experiencing this?

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Comments

By Ekaj on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 10:35

I don't own an Apple watch or an iPad, but I do own the other 2 devices you speak of here and I recently became a hearing aid user. What I think is happening is that Apple is trying to make changes across the board to accommodate those of us who use hearing aids. I realize this is a bit daunting, and I myself haven't yet wrapped my head around it all. However, I have begun exploring these changes and am pretty impressed thus far. I'm also impressed with my hearing aids, but I believe I wrote about that elsewhere on the website and in at least one of my journals.

By TheBllindGuy07 on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 10:35

I was also a hearing aid user awhile ago and I admit that it makes perfectly sense. Then only the voiceover volume command with the mac is the real bug. I remember myself wishing to have a more granular volume control back then :) just wished better documentation / explaination ffrom them.

By TheBllindGuy07 on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 10:35

Correction, on ios on my iphone 14 I can't adjust voiceover volume with the rotor at all.

By Holger Fiallo on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 10:35

When I went to rase the volume for VO to 120 for the audioducking, the apple sounds did not work well. The notification sounds could not be heard. Audioducking does not work the same way it did before Apple change it. Now I put VO on 100 and the sounds are back to normal. Audioducking not to much. I only had one word for all these. NUTS.

By PaulMartz on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 10:35

On Mac, I don't use a trackpad. I change volume with VO+Equals and VO+Minus. I'm still on 14.6.1. The most significant issue I've encountered is that sometimes volume spontaneously increases to maximum during OS updates.

On my Mac wish list: A way to adjust the volumes of individual apps. It is incredibly difficult to use my computer with VoiceOver when someone is chattering away in a Zoom call.

On the iPhone, I always use the hardware volume buttons. Most significant issue is that iOS becomes confused when I attempt to adjust SIRI and VoiceOver independently. For example, if VoiceOver seems too quiet, I will increase the volume to a comfortable level. Then, next time I use SIRI, it will be close to maximum volume. I also struggle to set a good volume for a phone call when using the phone in handset mode.

At the top of my iPhone wish list is a way to control the volume of the alarm in the clocks app. It always plays at max volume. That's one way to get me out of bed. What I'd really like is an alarm that starts quiet and slowly increases in volume until turned off.

By Andrew J Godwin on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 10:35

So I'm probably not the best source for giving you feedback on this issue, but I will say that I'm not experiencing these issues.

I do own a Mac but it is stuck all the way back on macOS Monterey. However, I have an iPhone 12, XR, seventh generation iPad, and Apple Watch series 7, along with some other devices which are stuck on iOS/iPadOS 15 because I like collecting Apple products. But all of the devices that can be updated to iOS/iPadOS 18 and watchOS 11 have been updated.

On my iPhone and iPad I use the volume buttons. I'm not experiencing any issues with adjusting the VoiceOver volume on these devices, then again when I adjust the VoiceOver volume I'm trying to adjust the entire system volume, not just the VoiceOver volume.

Regarding the watch, the volume adjusting gesture with two fingers pressed and held on the screen similar to the element label or feature on iOS and iPadOS then dragging up and down seems to work fine for me, at least as well as it ever did work, I never completely loved the feature but it didn't seem to be the most unintuitive thing to me.

By TheBllindGuy07 on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 10:35

For me on the watch my volume has been blocked to a certain value which is clearly not the real 100% it's like the voice only has 60% of volume available at maximum, and it still goes out of range way above 100% until 199% with no effect whatsoever.
I think I mentioned this before but I am on the developer beta on all and macos has two partition one with beta and one on stable.

By Michael Hansen on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 10:35

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

To get VoiceOver volume to go higher on the Watch, tell Siri to "Set media volume to 100%." You can also accomplish this by playing music or a podcast through the internal speaker and turning the Digital Crown. I already reported this issue to Apple in Feedback.

By TheBllindGuy07 on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 10:35

Dear apples community I am so happy to be on the developer beta of watchOS 11.1, I think I discovered the most clever bug ever and I genuinely don't think many people could have noticed it and report it appropriately, or maybe yes?.

Bug1:
Simple, whenever we use the VoiceOver volume option in the rotor on the watch or the double tap, hold and swipe up to control the volume that way, after 100% the volume continues going up and out of range until 199% and obviously it's purely a software issue as fortunately for the poor little tiny speakers the volumes stays at 100% (100% from VoiceOver point of view only, this will have its importance later). So this is straightforward.

Bug two though is everything but that :)
Without technical detail as I still feel having less than the minimum knowledge of these things to try talk about it ... Basically a digital signal processor is a very technical thing, very low level staying just before the hardware speaker and the rest of the firmware / kernel of the os so the speaker are fine tuned to deliver the best sound they can (aka MacBook speakers among other things). You can see on Asahi linux threads on reddit and in the project itself Asahi hadn't had ability to play audio through the internal speaker of the Mac only via jack or usb c I guess for that very reason because they were coding their own DSP...
Sorry for the tangent. So for a speaker as tiny as that of the watch, and in fact most modern devices had them... Back to the second bug.
Michael, thank you for your suggestion. Siri works, playing media too, and also the volume control in the control centre. My initial bug with the watch being very slow in adjusting volume was easily solved thanks to this when I put it at 100%. I in fact never thought that the VoiceOver volume adjustment is not the system wide one on the watch. So what happened is that now my volume was at 100, and I could just lower the VO volume to suit my need. I discovered then that the dip does not take into account VoiceOver volume being lowered so all the frequency protection on the speakers are still applied even if the VoiceOver volume is at like 20%, which gives a sound that could be better if the full frequency were applied to the sound. You put your system volume around 70-80% and then the VoiceOver sound will become quite good. I wouldn't be surprised to know we already had this bug for awhile as it's so technical and people would not have noticed or bothered reporting it anyway because who cares about the sound on the apple watch? But still it is a bug, and a very subtle one.

By TheBllindGuy07 on Monday, October 21, 2024 - 10:35

How come can they say this is working as designed for applewatch? Unless my report was very confusing now my volume on the watch is totally messed up before I was only changing the rotor volume but now I have to somehow manage both voiceover and watch volume to suit my need of controlling volume as I want.