I think I'm giving up on youtube on IOS

I don't like the way Youtube on iOS is going either.
I think they've made some bad UX decisions in certain parts of the app, and definite accessibility mistakes in views such as the search results, where there are unlabeled elements that do nothing in the focus order.
I much preferred the previous way of using the rotor to interact with secondary actions on the given elements.

Best
M

It's been a couple of weeks, but I've been able to watch videos etc on Youtube through Safari on iOS fairly well. I've never had a need to use the app, and just put links to the different channels on my Favorites... sheet or screen, or whatever it's called.

Agreed. Youtube in a mobile browser is definitely better than the app experience right now.

It’s available from GitHub although if you don’t want to deal with that interface, I have a copy I can send to anyone who wants it. You can browse watch and download YouTube in a completely accessible windows application. There’s hotkeys for everything. The only downside is that you aren’t signed in to your account so it doesn’t surface what you like but you can search for whatever you’d like to watch.

I am hoping for a windows 12 that is mobile and can run jaws and nvda. I’d buy a windows 12 phone in a heartbeat Co-pilot is incredibly useful in my day to day life. I’d be glad to abandon apple voiceover.

However, the YouTube app is mostly accessible. If changes are wanted, people could reach out to google accessibility directly on the be my eyes app. It’s the same story. Not enough people are reaching out to incentivize improvements

@Andy Ah excellent! I do find the Youtube browser experience good, but this would be a great supplement on Windows. For downloading Youtube videos, I generally use Youtube-DL or YT-DLP through the command line on mac, which works well.
@Ash I Already reached out to Google a11y through BME when they started going down this route.

They had a good product working with voice over properly and of course screwed it up I won't use it any more. Reaching out to Google is pointless.

I definitely agree. It seems to be how Google like to do things. A lot of apps do this on Android, where they have separate buttons rather than fully utilising the actions menu. It’s one of the things that drove me back to iOS.
To use YouTube efficiently, I find that exploring the screen rather than swiping is often the best. Of course this can require some learning of the interface.
I find it a better and easier experience on iPad than on iPhone.
Dave

I think you have to turn off "Video Previews" in the settings. I haven't logged in in a long time, though, so I don't exactly remember where the settings menu is.

This is how it has always bin on android

I am used to it

The VO equivalent of explore by touch is not just a decoration. It's actually useful with such weird bad bugs. You can just try to mess around the upper area of the screen when viewing a video around the channel name and slightly below it and you will find the like share option if subscribed to the channel and etc. I will only understand and acknowledge the severity of this bug if the original poster or the other members also have motor issues. Yes, the action button after each video annoying but you can still touch the screen fromtop to bottom and scroll with three fingers. Or what about this bug premium subscribe only can have where each time you switch to the app from another while a video is playing there is a suttle cut in the sound which is not a pause so you lose some milliseconds? That is happening on my iphone 14, iphone xs, and ipod touch 7 + the other bug mentioned above. Frustrating? Of course it is. Viable workaround without having to use safari mobile website? Yes for those who can, and only for those who have phisical impairment as well do I address my best wishes to.

So I just put youtube on my new SE and I have to say I appreciate the familiarity from android. Probably their devs just got confused by half the blind people saying they want to know everything on the screen and the other half wanting to hide lots of what's on the screen to save time. At least google's disability support people can give relatively consistent answers to their customers on all platforms now. Anyway, it turns out years on android made me a better iOS user because I'm exploring by touch a lot more than I did 3 years ago and at this point the apps on both phones are about equal for me. I just don't see the big fuss with two extra swipes.

Brad, I’m pretty sure Holy Diver, and others for that matter, understand what you’re saying. They just don’t necessarily agree that it’s a bad thing.
Personally I’m pretty comfortable with exploring the screen, but I still prefer the iOS style of grouping elements and utilising the actions menu to access options, but it’s not necessarily a clear right and wrong.
Ideally Google would apply iOS standards and expectations in their iOS apps, but I can understand why they might prefer consistency across iOS and Android from a development point of view.

My tone may have been felt offensive. @Dave Nason has an excelent point, google should ideally follow apple accessibility standards on their own platform. And yes, it is frustrating when browsing through videos below the player when watching and having to swipe three times. Is there a workaround? Yes. See my post about how pages is uneusable and I think everyone wil understand the concept of "priority of accessibility bug" as macos accessibility is becoming even more #frustrating. Unlike apple, google are very... private, about accessibility so the dream of seeing an option so specific for voiceover users under youtube settings to togle whichever behavior they want is very unlikely.

Specially, the stupid short videos. Why don't they just give you an option whether you want to watch a short video or the whole video?
Well, I have to say that I don't wish to pay for a subscription for YouTube. Too expensive and not worth it for me.

I use Google News a lot, and interestingly, it does still use the iOS approach to actions on the iOS version, whereas the Android version has the extra buttons.

Honestly, I don't care, as long as it's usable. There's a difference between usable, and accessable.

After reading more comments here I find myself more sympathetic to the original complaint. That's not because of the youtube app itself, on the scale of issues we face on either mobile OS, or with accessibility in general, a couple extra swipes between videos doesn't seem like much of a much. I'm concerned about the possible start of a trend though, the gmail app on iOS relies heavily on those actions and changing that would be much more of a problem than making youtube slightly slower. I'm not sure how concerned I should be though since, if my time on android has taught me anything it's just how fragmented google's accessibility is even between apps. Youtube seems to be siloed from gmail, they've all got separate teams from the people who work on Docs and the talkback team is separate from that. I like that approach for myself, it means gmail access issues stay in the gmail app usually and when a bug pops up with youtube it's likely to stay in youtube instead of affecting my whole OS. Still, I think that approach works a lot better on android than iOS and google should have taken that into account.
It's actually kind of ironic, with container navigation in talkback youtube on android behaves much more like the old iOS app than my iPhone does now. I chalk that up to google's approach being more optimized for android where the talkback team can more easily make their existing infrastructure work. That's probably a lot harder on the iPhone side and you've all mostly convinced me that Google should stick to iOS guidelines for their iOS app, even if it's more confusing for developers to support voiceover actions.
Edit: Turns out that container navigation thing I was saying doesn't work as well as I thought, it's useful but not the same thing. I hope google walks it back, what's the state of third party youtube apps now? That may be an alternative?

As far as I know, Drive on iOS displaies the action button for each file and folder since... quite awhile now if I remember it correctly back in 2016 on my iPod touch 6 it was used to be liked that. Maybe Drive was like that from the begining and we were just lucky with youtube until recently?
*Drive, Docs and the other GSuite apps as well.