Hi all, I'm observing that voiceover only reads photo captions in certain situations when browsing through my photo library. I was wondering if anyone else is able to reproduce this bug and if so, has found a workaround.
TLDR summary:
Voiceover reads captions if I receive photos that are captioned and add them to my library, but fails to identify captions if I have added the captions to photos that were initially taken on my device. I've outlined what I'm talking about in greater detail below.
Longer summary:
If I receive a photo that has a caption, voiceover will read the caption when I save it to my library and swipe to it during navigation. If I send a photo to a friend with a caption, voiceover will read the photo caption on their device if they save a copy.
Unfortunately when I add captions to my photos that previously didn't have any, voiceover fails to read the captions for those photos the next time I'm in my photo library. I can confirm that the captions are present, because selecting each image and then choosing the info option at the bottom of the screen allows me to go down to the caption field and review the text I previously entered. What's more, if I send the captioned image to a friend, voiceover properly reads that caption whenever the image is selected, even though it doesn't do so on my phone.
Any advice on how to resolve this annoying glitch is definitely apreciated. My photo library is getting large, and although voiceover generated photo descriptions are useful, it's becoming hard to remember where I was or why I took certain pictures as time passes. For this reason I would love to make greater use of the caption feature assuming I can get it to work with voiceover as expected.
By John H, 7 February, 2024
Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Comments
Same Problem
I just learned that one can add captions to photos. As you say, however, the captions do not show up when I browse through the photo library on my iPhone. So that is no help.
Hope someone has a solution for Apple fixes this behavior.
--Pete
What about videos?
Nice that this can sometimes be done for photos, but I can't seem to add a description for videos in the same way that I can for photos.
When you open the photo, one can click the Edit button, and then go to the Markup buttons which opens up a dialog for adding a description that Voiceover will read when navigating through photos in the Photo app.
However, when doing the same thing for a video,after hitting the Edit button, there is no Markup button. So you can't add a description to the video.
One would think that adding such descriptions to photos would work the same way for videos. Is this an oversight by Apple or a bug?
Maybe someone knows how to label videos if there is a different process from labeling photos.
--Pete