Confusing Safari behavior in iOS

By PaulMartz, 5 March, 2022

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Okay, this behavior is so bizarre that I’m unsure how to describe it other than “confusing”. Here goes, and try to stay with me.

I open Safari, which already has a tab or two open, and I want to open a new tab. I press Command+N on my Bluetooth keyboard. VoiceOver tells me my focus is on the label that reads Favorites.

Naturally, I now want to jump to the address text field. But the location of the address text field isn’t clear. If I turn on quick nav and jump to the end with Xontrol+Down arrow, I find the address field not far from the bottom, definitely after the favorites. But if I instead press Command+L, somehow the address text field is now the very first control, all the way up at the top. It’s very confusing, but that’s not the end of this post.

While in edit mode, I enter the address applevis.com and press enter. This does, in fact, load the AppleVis website. But VoiceOver gives me no feedback that this has happened. VoiceOver doesn’t announce the first page element, which is where I expect focus to be. VoiceOver says nothing. If I try to navigate with VO+left or right, VoiceOver tells me “text field, is editing”, and won’t let me move out of this control. I thought this might be related to the new group navigation mode, but VO+Shift+up arrow doesn’t get me out of this single-element focus trap that I’ve somehow landed in. I’ve found only one workaround, and that is to again turn on quick nav, then press control+Up arrow, which takes me to the top of the AppleVis website. Once I’m there, I can navigate the website normally.

I guess I should mention that this all used to work in an intuitive and non-confusing manner, and only since iOS 15 have I started to encounter these issues. I’m about ready to file a bug report with Apple, I’m just not sure exactly how to phrase it. And I wanted to see if anyone else has encountered similar problems.

Options

Comments

By PaulMartz on Thursday, March 24, 2022 - 19:07

While creating this post, I occasionally encountered situations where VO focus jumped to the menu bar as if I had pressed VO+M. However, I’ve been unable to find a way to reproduce this behavior consistently.

By Greg Wocher on Thursday, March 24, 2022 - 19:07

Hello,
One thing you could try is to put the address bar back at the top of the page. To do this, first go to settings/safari. Next look for the heading labeled tabs. Select the option that says separate tab bar. Once this is selected it should move the address bar back to the top of the page and this might help with some of the inconsistencies you are seeing.