About this time last Year, Thomas Donville produced some excellent podcasts about SIRI Shortcuts. I listened, became enthralled and, as a programmer forced to retire through sight loss, got a new, fantastic lease of life. Since then, I have written over 200 shortcuts and, although challenging, I have enjoyed it. The effort involved, as I am totally blind, has been tremendous and I have worked many 20-hour days. However, since IOS 13 came out, shortcuts, for me, is broken! There are lots of bugs in the app with Voice Over not reading page elements. Also, Apple have upgraded the shortcuts themselves to the new version, so I can not use them in the original version, and introduced bugs into my work. I am devastated at my loss of a year’s work. Can anyone help please?
Comments
it may improve, but
They usually iron out some of the bugs as time goes by.
You should send that post to accessibility@apple.com.
But this sort of thing is always going to happen with apple or microsoft.
you only have a tiny bit of control with these operating systems.
some versions of linux give the user more contrkl, but nobody is safe from updates.
I feel your pain, believe me.
I feel your pain, believe me. The fact that menus are pretty much completely broken in Shortcuts is hideous. Not only is this broken in a shortcut, it's also broken when editing a shortcut, so things like if conditions don't get read while you're choosing them and you have to select options then look at the sentence afterwards.
A couple of hints. Choose from list will work in a widget, so if you can get your shortcut to run in a widget, or at least part of it so you can choose options then have it run in Shortcuts, you can rescue some of them.
Siri can read options, so if you can get it to run in Siri and talk to it, you can do it that way too.
Most of your share sheet Shortcuts should still work fine, at least the ones that don't use menus.
Shortcuts can be written an edited, you just need patience with things like conditions in if statements, since the menu bug's in there too and you can't see what you're choosing. A lot of the rest of it's working out how the new editor works, which is actually pretty nice once they fix some of the more glaring bugs.
I've already submitted a reasonably detailed bug report to accessibility, but you should probably do the same. They asked me for things like screen recordings and step by step ways to reproduce the problem, so I'm pretty sure it went somewhere.
Thank You
Thank you Yvonnezed for your helpful words. Whilst I am unhappy that you have been experiencing the same problems, I draw solace in that I am not alone. I have contacted Apple twice and we have done Screen Sharing so I could demonstrate the bugs and I hope that this will go far. However, messing things up in this way was not very professional of them. IOS 13.1 came out a week after IOS 13.0 and, I dare say that it took more than a week to create the 13.1 fix and so it seems that 13.0 was released in the knowledge of all of these bugs. I hope that this does not kill SIRI Shortcuts, by virtue of reputation, as it is a good idea. Thanks again for your help and I hope that you get your difficulties resolved soon.
Menus work for me and I can use most interface elements by now
I also have shortcuts that stopped working and it is frustrating. However, I don't see the problems with if conditions or menus described here. Did you guys see a fix since these posts? My big issue is with the "adjust date" action that can not be adjusted. Other similar commands work well. The rotor actions for shortcuts work quite well. Still, very frustrating that old shortcuts are broken now and basically impossible to fix and almost easier to write over...