Anyone else having issues with voicemail and VoiceOver?

By Bob Cavanaugh, 21 December, 2018

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi everyone,
Can someone please help me with this, or confirm this is a bug with VO? I seem to be having focus issues in the voicemail section of the phone app on my iPhone SE. A couple weeks ago, I decided to clear out six months worth of voicemails on my phone. I usually listen to them one more time before they are deleted, but I couldn't make that happen for all of them this time. I got another message this week because I ignored a phone call, and it did the same thing. Anyone else having problems? What's typically been happening is I double tap the message to expand the actions but the messages play only spiratically. Right now, there's only one message on my phone, and when I double tap to expand it, it expands fine, but when I double tap the play button to actually listen to the message, it simply collapses without playing. There were also times when I was cleaning out the mailbox that I would double tap the play button and instead of playing the message, it would kick me to the favorites tab. Is anyone else having these problems and how do I fix them?

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Comments

By Lukas on Thursday, December 27, 2018 - 04:31

But this is usually the universal thing to try first, although there are many cases where the solution unfortunately is not as simple as that. Try restarting the app, then VoiceOver and then finally the device itself, in this order, if the problem still persists after every step. VoiceOver has had more bugs with focus reliability and triggering the double tap gesture than even before ever since the first betas of iOS 12 and they haven't been fixed to this day, but they only happen quite rarely to me personally and so far these steps fixed all of these occurrences, fortunately.

By Bob Cavanaugh on Thursday, December 27, 2018 - 04:31

I shut my phone off before bed every night, so that wouldn't help. It certainly appears that the focus is in the right place as it's not jumping around on me or anything, in fact the only time I've had problems with that is in the Groupon app in the last couple versions. However, when I try to interact with a voicemail message, it just collapses instead of doing what it's supposed to.

By Ray B on Thursday, December 27, 2018 - 04:31

Hello Bob, the same issue occurred with my phone, especially in those voice messages that are longer than 20 seconds. I did report the issue to Apple and it appears it is something to do with the length of the transcriptions.
I also like listening to my voice message one more time before deleting and here is the workaround that works for me. I go to my voicemail tab and double click on the voicemail that I want to listen to. I flick right until I identify the audio file and flick up until I hear share. Then, I share it by message to myself. I will receive a text message with the audio file attached and listen to the audio before deleting the file. In the alternative, you can go to your keypad and hold down the #one button until your voicemail answers and listen to all of your voice messages that way. I hope this helps, Ray