VO Volume when background sounds (music, youtube, etc) is played

By Althea, 13 April, 2014

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

hi! can anyone help me out? each time i play a music, be it in my player or in youtube, and i try to navigate the active interface, voice over no longer dominates the background sound (which it normally does before). i don't know if it's a bug or if i just messed up with my settings. what can i do about this? thanks.

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By dvdmth on Thursday, April 24, 2014 - 03:59

Is this about an iOS device, or is it for the Mac? If it's for the Mac, there is a setting in VoiceOver Utility under Mavericks that controls whether or not audio will duck during VoiceOver speech. You might check to see if you might have changed this setting by mistake. If this is for iOS, the audio ducking feature is not fully reliable. I know of at least two situations where the ducking will not work as expected. The first is if something starts playing while VoiceOver is speaking, in which case the newly playing audio will be at full volume in addition to VoiceOver. The other is if a notification sound plays, such as for new mail, while VoiceOver is speaking. Any audio that was playing the background will no longer be ducked after the notification sound finishes playing, even if VoiceOver is still speaking. To work around the ducking problem in iOS, wait for VoiceOver to stop speaking, or tap the screen with two fingers to pause VoiceOver speech. Give the iOS device a couple of seconds, then start using it again. Now the ducking behavior should be back to normal.