iOS, iPadOS, Activities, and language switching; bug or by design?

By Nikola, 3 November, 2021

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi there

First of all sorry on my english.
Hopefully I will be able to explain my problem.

I use Iphone XS and Ipad Pro second generation.
On my Iphone i have installed ios version 15.1
On my Ipad i have installed Ipad Os 15.1

My iphone and ipad are setuped as follows
Settings > General > Language & Region > Prefered Language
English en-US is prefered and Croatian (Hrvatski) is secondary (second on the list)

Settings > Accessiblity > Voice Over > Speech
Default Language is Alex (en-US) and in rotor languages i have
Czech (closest to Croatian)

Since I'm using email app most of messages are on Croatian but 10% of them is on english.
Its logical to setup an activity wich i did.

I created an activity that will activate when i use mail app.
And it works great. Once i open my mail app the czech voice is automatically activated.

Now we get to the issue.
As i mentioned above I also have mail messages that are on english.
When i go to english mail message I use rotor, navigate to language, it says "default english"
but it stays on czech. There is no way to change language.

If i delete activity I can use rotor in my mail app to choose language/Voice I wish

Also I use Safari for mostly english sites and its also logical to create an activity :-)
So i created an activity to activate Alex voice when i use Safari.
Everything works fine but problem starts when i go to a site that uses croatian language.
I again try to use rotor navigate to czech but voice always stays in english.

If i delete activity I can change voice using rotor in safari.

The problem is on my Ipadd as well since activities are synced.

Is this by design or a bug. To me it seems as a bug.
Can anyone reproduce this issue as well or can anyone help me to resolve it.

Many thx!

Options

Comments

By Maldalain on Thursday, November 25, 2021 - 01:45

OK I have the same issue, to get things as short as possible for convenience sake, language switching is disabled when an activity is in use, this has to be addressed by Apple, also activities have to include more options already available in VO settings.

I agree that activity should have more setting available in VO settings as well.
It would be also nice If we can choose to choose website to activate activity like on mac.

I will report this as a bug to apple.

By TJT 2001 on Thursday, November 25, 2021 - 01:45

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you or if you've already tried this, but, instead of using the Language option in the rotor, could you use the Activities option instead when you want to read an email in English?

By Lielle ben simon on Thursday, November 25, 2021 - 01:45

Hi, I suggest to you to change the acctivity for "activity unselected" in order to go back to your normal behavior. Activity is not replace the switching language. It could be a bug, but I don't thnk so. I am think that Apple's ment to it.

When I'm in a mail and I want to read english email I do the following

- Two-finger quadruple tap.
- go to language and English is selected
- Tap done

And it still reads on Czech.

I definetly think that this is a bug.

By TJT 2001 on Thursday, November 25, 2021 - 01:45

You just tried to change the language; I suggested that you change the activity.

Find the rotor option called Activities. If you don't have this option, go to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Rotor and add it. Once you find it, flick up or down until you reach the "no activity selected" option.

By Wenwei on Thursday, November 25, 2021 - 01:45

I have the same issue. As TJT 2001 already suggested, I have specific activities that I manually choose from my rotor: activities that have different braille, language, and voice specifications. I suggest that you create and appropriately name your desired activities, add activities to your rotor, and don't assign any contexts or apps to them.

By Nikola on Thursday, November 25, 2021 - 01:45

I received reply from Apple.

"
Hello,

Thank you for your email. We appreciate you taking the time to provide your configuration and a brief summary.

We were able to reproduce the behavior and have passed this information along to the appropriate team for review.

Sincerely,

Apple Accessibility
"