Safari - pop up buttons on web page not opening a picker

By Brian Negus, 19 June, 2020

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi, I've seen similar items to this for earlier versions of iOS without any clear resolution. Forgive me for trying again! I'm training someone remotely, thanks to lockdown, using a landline phone and today we hit an issue on her iPhone 8 running iOS 13.5.1 that I can't reproduce on my own iPhone 8 running the same iOS version. She is using Safari and double taps on a pop up button. It doesn't open a picker item for her. Earlier in the same session on the same website a different pop up button worked perfectly and opened the picker as expected. I have followed her actions as best I can on my own iPhone and it works fine. The picker definitely isn't there on her iPhone since if she slides her finger up from the Home button, she finds the share button. It isn't going to be easy to get her to troubleshoot this so I'm hoping that someone may have experienced similar behaviour and be able to offer some insights. It's a website that she used a lot when she had sufficient sight to use her PC but she can no longer see well enough to do that. Since she is elderly and learning new skills is a little slower now we decided that since she needed both an accessible phone and computer and would need to learn some new screen reader skills, it would be best to give her a combined phone and computer through an iPhone and it has been working remarkably well - until today!
Thanks, Brian

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Comments

By dvdmth on Sunday, July 5, 2020 - 23:31

I have had intermittent issues with buttons on webpages in general, including popup buttons, ordinary push buttons, check boxes, and the like. Sometimes VoiceOver will be focused on a button that isn't actually on the screen, so any attempt to activate it will either have no effect at all or cause some other element on the page to be hit instead. This has been a problem for a long time, with different iOS versions having different levels of success on different pages. It's one reason I find myself using the Mac to navigate the web more often than I used to.

The best advice I have to try to work around the issue is to move VoiceOver a few elements past the button you're trying to interact with, then navigate back to the button and try again. Or try to find the button by touch by dragging a finger around the screen instead of swiping.

Another factor that can prevent a button from working is if the webpage is displaying an overlay, such as a dialog with additional info or some other choice you have to make, and until that overlay is closed the rest of the webpage won't function at all. Yet VoiceOver will continue to read the rest of the contents of the page as if the overlay wasn't there. In this scenario, dragging a finger around the screen is the best way to discover if any such element is present.

I have also had limited success switching between landscape and portrait modes. For some reason switching the orientation can get a misbehaving webpage to work properly, though I'm not really sure why.

By Siobhan on Sunday, July 5, 2020 - 23:31

Hi. Is it possible to put a link to this site, so we could help a little more? I also have an iPhone 8+ not that the + makes a difference. I wonder if maybe having her reboot the phone and trying with only safari open would do the trick? I understand skills learning is difficult but possibly the phone's just being stubborn? I'm sorry I'm not more help.

Thanks for that, dvdmth. I must have been lucky so far in failing to experience this issue myself. Your possible work arounds are helpful and I've decided to visit the learner, who isn't too far away and take a look at her phone in her garden. I'm hoping ti will fail for me so that I can try the work arounds myself.

By Brian Negus on Sunday, July 5, 2020 - 23:31

Thanks for the offer of help, Siobhan. The website is the Jacqui Lawson greeting cards site. We had already found that the desktop site was a little easier to navigate with VoiceOver than the mobile version, so we have been using that. Judging by the earlier comment, though, this issue isn't specific to a website. I haven't experienced it personally, but it may just be one of those things that VoiceOver can't always get right. I think it may be necessary to have an account with Jacqui Lawson before you can work with the site. I've been doing my tests logged in as my learner with her permission. If you or others have time to take a look and spot anything I'd be very grateful. The site is https://www.jacquielawson.com/

Thanks to everyone who replied. A suggestion from dvdmth has fixed the problem for my learner. I visited her garden and worked on her phone out there. She had rotation lock set on her iPhone 8 and I turned it off. The Jacqui Lawson website still failed to open a pop up button correctly at the same location it always failed. However, turning the phone to landscape and back to portrait fixed the issue and subsequent pop up buttons worked correctly. This is an acceptable fix and I hope that it keeps working for my learner. I am still intrigued that I cannot reproduce the issue on my own iPhone 8 and, if time permists after lockdown, I'll do some more experimentation to try to pin down possible triggers for the misbehaviour. Or maybe I should just wait for iOS 14!. Anyway, thanks all.

Thanks again, dvdmth. I have now discovered that the web page that my learner was using had a cookies notice right at the bottom of the page and, depending on how she navigated to the pop up button, this cookies notice occasionally obscured the pop up button. Under these circumstances, VoiceOver spoke the pop up button but it wouldn't expand into a picker when double tapped. We could solve the problem by accepting cookies and hopefully removing the item forever, or for a while at least! This emphasises your advice that it's necessary to feel around the screen to try to discover items that might be causing the unexpected pop up button behaviour.