Hello, the Applevis community feels that the initial release of Siri Shortcuts was excellently compatible with the VoiceOver screen reader. However, with each new update, the errors start to appear, and its compatibility with VoiceOver deteriorates. Previously, it was exceptionally compatible, as is known about Apple, but with each update, attention wanes and errors ensue. So the question is, does the blind community not care about designing shortcuts? Because using these shortcuts is easy; the execution area is very straightforward and compatible. However, when designing shortcuts, there are many problems, whether on iOS or macOS systems. I would appreciate your answer thank you.
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Shortcut bugs
Are you going to tell us what bugs you're talking about?
Multiple issues for accessibility on iOS and macOS
If you interact with a group by performing an action, VoiceOver suddenly leaves the group. Additionally, when you focus on an action, VoiceOver will pronounce it, but if you press it, it won't select it because "the rectangle, VoiceOver is not in the action." This is on the macOS system. Also, there are many errors. Coming to iOS, some texts like "match and find under place" you cannot use the rotor, nor can you edit for copy-paste. You also cannot use the rotor to move by characters or words. Another problem is for every action with a magic, variable, if you want to edit, you cannot touch the sheet until you turn off voice and swipe it up. There are many problems with editing for compatibility with VoiceOver on macOS and iOS.
Confirmed: Shortcuts difficult if not impossible to use with Voi
I can confirm this with iOS 17 on my iPhone.
When the Shortcuts app first came out, I was able to create custom shortcuts using Voiceover. Now it is much more difficult and, in some instances, impossible.
This is particularly frustrating because several shortcuts I had developed a few years ago and had been using successfully all of a sudden broke in iOS 17. Besides complaining to Apple Accessibility support about the broken shortcuts (which didn't result in any helpful action), I decided to try and edit these old shortcuts to get them to work. Well, that turned out to be a nightmare and I couldn't do it.
One example was when trying to work with the "condition" of an "If" action. Trying to activate the "condition" crashed the Shortcuts app and I was returned to the home screen. This problem was also reported by another post on AppleVis.
Hopefully Apple can make the Shortcuts app more easily workable with Voiceover in the future so that we are not left behind on what is possible for people using Voiceover.
--Pete
The Shortcuts app is…
The Shortcuts app is included with iOS by default. If it's not on your Home Screen or App Library, you should be able to "Redownload" it from the App Store, which basically unhides it if it was previously removed.
HTH
Link to Shortcuts app
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shortcuts/id1462947752
For anyone who needs it. 😎
No worries
When all else fails, just remember your faithful, and occasionally useful, AI friend, Siri. 😇
the crash with the if action
From what I can work out from my testing, the crash when using if seems to happen mainly at the beginning of the shortcut. In other words, if there's no variable for it to work with. In fact, if you just drag an if statement into an empty shortcut, you don't even seem to be able to add a variable to it either.
A work around for this would probably be to make sure there's something in the shortcut first, for example, if you want to do something based on the shortcut input, first create a get variable action to get it, then add the if. that'll automatically pull the variable in and at least in my testing, seems to let me add a condition without crashing the app.
Obviously, this is just a quick test on my iPad Pro running 17.03, your mileage may vary.
It's definitely worth reporting though, although any reports I make will probably be after 17.1 gets released.