I recently reset my iPhone and restored from a backup I made on my PC just before the reset. Now I seem to have lots of issues with my iPhone XR.
First, although I have the Alex voice selected under Accessibility / speech, I am still hearing the Siri voice.
Second, when I swipe to a button or checkbox, Voiceover is no longer speaking (button" to let me know an element is a button, and the status of checkboxes is not spoken as "checked" or "unchecked".
Third, when I swipe to an element that is selected, Voiceover only says "selected" but does not tell me what is selected.
Fourth, I am hearing a lot of extraneous weird speech. For example, on the numpad of the locked screen, instead of simply speaking the number, I hear a long string of characters with the number embedded inside the long string of characters.
What is going on? I did the restore last night and the phone had plenty of time to download whatever content it should have needed.
Any suggestions? One would think a backup and restore should be simple.
thanks.
--Pete
Comments
Reset all settings
The first thing I'd try is restarting the phone to see if that makes a difference. If it doesn't, you can try resetting all settings in Settings > General > Transfer or reset.
HTH
Siri speech
Siri speech can be turned off under accessibility/spoken content
Re: Siri speech
Not sure what you are talking about. Are you suggesting that somehow I could turn off Siri speech and that might solve some of my problems?
--Pete
Did you try setting up as new?
Hi,
Wow! Those issues sound very strange.
Did you try to setup your phone as, "New?"
If not, do that & see what happens.
I think the problem is Alex
thanks everyone for their responses.
After working with these issues a bit more, here is a summary of what I am finding:
- Although the Alex voice was selected after the restore of my phone, the voice itself was not actually downloaded. Thus the phone was defaulting to a Siri type voice.
- After downloading the nearly 1 GB Alex English voice, I found that I was still experiencing the issues of:
-- strange characters being spoken between other text
-- Selected items saying "selected" but not speaking what was actually selected
-- When swiping to a button, the label was spoken but Voiceover was not telling me that it was a button.
- After seeing these problems with the Alex voice, I decided to download and use the Eloquence "Eddy" voice. Amazingly, mhy problems were almost all solved!
-- Selected items spoke what was selected
-- I was told that I was on a button when swiping to such an element
-- No more random characters were spoken
-- also, I noticed that the phone was a lot more responsive than it had been when using the Alex voice. Not surprising since the Eloquence voice has a much smaller footprint and takes up much less resources.
In summary, it seems that the problems were all related to the Alex voice.
Now, the question is, how can I delete that Alex voice that uses up nearly 1 GB on my phone and doesn't work? I couldn't find such an option in the Voiceover / Speech / Voices dialog where I thought it would be near the download button.
Hope this helps someone. Don't know why Alex seems to work so badly. I never had that problem with Alex before the restore. The "new" Alex doesn't even seem to sound as good as the one I was using before the restore.
--Pete
Actions rotor
To delete the Alex voice, go to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Speech > Voice > Alex, focus on Alex, and select the "Delete" rotor action.
Re: To delete Alex
Thanks for the suggestion, but there was no rotor action to delete the Alex voice either in the list of voices or wthin the Alex dialog itself. The only options I saw in either place in the rotor actions were to pplay the sample voice or to activate it.
In the Alex dialog I did see an "Edit" button which opened up a dialog. Unfortunately, there was no "delete" or "remove" button and, again, the only actions available were to play a sample or activate the voice. The only other button in the dialog was a "Close" button.
Very strange.
--Pete
Restore Settings
Like Tyler said, try restoring your settings if a reboot doesn't solve the issue. For good measure, reboot again even after the settings restore reboots the device. Your last step should be a factory reset. You may find this solves a lot of weird glitches, even though you have to configure most things from scratch.
Installing Eloquence seems to have fixed problems
After I installed Eloquence, all seems to be fine now on my iPhone. don't know what was wrong with Alex since that worked before the restore.
Also, the phone is much more responsive now.
Unfortunately, I still can't get rid of the almost 1 GB worht of Alex. Getting into the Alex dialog and hitting the Edit button doesn't show any other buttons for deleting (even to a sighted user) as it should.
Oh well, what's an extra GB! At least things work now. I'll certainly stick with Eloquence.
--Pete