VoiceOver Bug in iOS 16.0 That causes Routine Voiceover crashes

Hello!

I am new here! This is my first comment!

This IOS 16 bug has occurred on five phones in my household, two IPhone 13 minis, 1 IPhone mini 12 and two IPhone SE 2020 phones. The SE phones aren’t being used presently but thought they should be upgraded. The IOS 16 upgrade seemed to be okay till my wife and I powered down our phones after performing the upgrade. When we powered up our phones, there was no voiceover. We couldn’t do much of anything with them! They were useless! We couldn’t power them down! My wife managed to type in her passcode which recovered her phone. I used Aira to get another passcode typed in which recovered my second phone. My main phone eluded me! Other things were appearing on the screen. I found a sighted person to type in my passcode and that recovered my main phone! A neighbor typed in the passcode for the SE phones. I never encountered this before since I’ve been using IPhones! Voiceover stopped in my wife’s phone once and when she did a diabetic reading, it came back! My phones keep working thus far! I hope I see a fix soon! Thanks for reading!

Jim

I have been using Siri to dictate voicemails and text messages forever
Recently I have noticed that she does not get anything right lately
I re-dictate the message three and four times until I finally say cancel
Then I open my text message I use the dictation feature on the keyboard there and it gets it right 100% of the time every time, first shot
I hope this is an issue that gets fixed with iOS 16

First, for Jimmy, the No VO Bug. I know from reading other posts that this happens to others too, so far I have not fallen prey to this particular bug (and I hope it stays that way), but rest assured that it's not just you.
As for the siri bug, I have neither experienced nor heard of it happening. I also have not experienced the bug the main poster has been talking about, but I might need more info. I can't exactly follow what you're saying here. What's the pattern? Every now and again VO will become sluggish when using split View, and VO and braille is in general more sluggish than it used to be, but that's basically it for me, maybe this is just me because I don't use my phone to do really heavy stuff like what you're mentioning, but yes, I would recommend you close out of your apps that are causing you problems. That has worked to resolve certain crashes for me. Another thing that might help avoid VO settings resetting maybe put your preferred VO settings into the Language rotor, and then use that. That way, when voiceOver resets you have a backup copy.

I recently was borrowing someone’s iPad who was on the beta and it was having the same issue as well. I don’t think it’s an iOS 15.7 issue. As far as the voiceover bug, Apple released a software update (iOS 16.0.2) which fixes that issue.
I had that issue, but what I did was left the phone alone for a few minutes and vo came back. If that didn’t work I would’ve had someone enter the passcode for me and probably would’ve downgraded after beta if that had happened to me, but thankfully that issue never happened to me.

I read about that issue at one point in the Beta forum, because I don't do betas, and wanted to use Ava Premium after I figured out how much better it sounded then Ava enhanced (as some of you know, I used to think they were the same thing), so I was wondering if that bug was fixed yet. I asked about it on another post but never received an answer. Thank you, Steve, for saying that.

There have been some moments when VO crashing, and the stupid Power Off screen that comes on just before it crashes completely and you have to restart it. I have had too many experiences with that screen. I also don't like when VO won't talk for a few seconds and then blurts practically everything on the screen in one go, on when it stops between. words. I have never experienced this crash so I don't exactly know what it looks / sounds like, but either way, I'm avoiding the premiums for now. Hope this gets fixed so I can get my hands on the new premiums that I was interested in.

Crossing finger. No issues with my 12 pro and iOS 16.02. Although I have this strange issue with VO. I change the voice for music, message, email. I added voices in iOS 15 but with 16, I made changes. Samantha comes for several seconds when I open music them the voice I select comes up. It happens with music, email and message.

Strangely, this reminds me of the issue where Samantha comes up if the phone knows I'm watching a voice download, because maybe VO is confused, and you would want to set up the activities again. I've had a few other incidents with this too, where if I'm scrolling through a particularly VO-nasty webpage in Chrome, Samantha will come on until I return to the saftey of my toolbar. Or if I'm scrolling through a long list in any app, it will be Samantha talking for a sometime after VO two-second crash-and-respring moment, and turning VO off and on helped. Never experienced these last two issues in ios16 though, only a few years back, but just may be a similar thing.

OK. I will delete them and set it up again. What a pain.

I hope it works. For all I know this could be totally different... but let me know.

It was what happened to me just before the braille display bug happened to me in ios15.2 and some other times—It only happens when a braille display is connected and it crashes. I don't know.

2 things are frustrating the hell out of me after I updated from the SE 2020 to the iPhone 12:

When using the app. switcher it does not say actions available and swiping up or down does not close the app. focused on. Sometimes when trying to get back to the app. it opensthe same app. that was last in use; I would have moved focus to the app. before or after it to open...

In the shortcuts app. if you have created an automation that has the text and speak text function; and have used a Siri voice e.g. Engliish American US/ Siri 3 when executing the automation the voice is choppy or the text just will not be spoken. Also Siri voices disappear; I did download Voice 4 for Siri English American US but when I went to create the automation and choose the voice, it was gone!

Both these challenges have been reported to the apple support team and they have no clue why it's happening.

Side note the 12 is bigger than the SE but still handy and pocketable - would recommend

Hello today was the very first time this happened that Voice Over on my iphone SE2 crashed while i am going through notifications, the voice stops speaking when i swipe through notifications and by tripple pressing the home button to switch voice over on or off i hear a little audio pop kinda like a stic pop then tripple press the home button again voice over comes back on. I restarted my iphone and it would not start back up , i mean i powered it down and it would not come back on until i hooked it up to the charger the phone came back on and still had 85% battery power left.

After turning it back on i went back into notfication center and start swiping through notfications and yes the same issue keeps happening, i have now cleared the notification center and have not tested it again altho using other apps on the phone seems to be ok the voice over wont crash unless i swipe through notifications. I am running 16.2 for quite a while now i think its time for an update but there isnt any yet.

Ok thanks for reading have a good day , mak :)

Hello everyone. I have been noticing voiceover has been crashing a lot since about IOS 16.4 or so. I'm running 16.5.1 now on an iPhone 11, and I am having voiceover crashes multiple times a day. I'm good with technology, so I know how to get out of this situation, but it's getting out of hand. I have been trying to find a situation where this keeps coming up, but it is not consistent. I could be responding to messages or using apps normally and voiceover will crash. I'm just going about my business on the phone and all of a sudden voiceover is gone. I'd love to report this to Apple, but I can't give them steps to reproduce the problem. I'm just wondering if anyone else is noticing this lately as well? I'm hoping there is a way we can help Apple resolve these issues for IOS 17 if they still exist. I'm going to do my typical IOS refresh install on the release of a new version.

I have the exact same issues as you describe.
I'm using Norwegian SIRI male and UK English SIRI male and VO crashes and restarts a lot.
My experience is that US SIRI voices crash even more often, so I've dropped using them.
VO seems to crash less often if compact voices or other non-SIRI voices is used with VO.
Hopefully iOS 17 will fix this huge annoyance and I will probably also do a factory reset when upgraded to 17 to get a fresh start.
I've also started considering to upgrade my phone.
iPhone XR is getting very old but the problem is just that I don't wanna pay for a new phone.
Darn expensive LOL

Apple told me they are aware of the issue. This was last Winter. They aren't on how irritated we are and how much damage they're doing to their accessibility image. If I was their head of accessibility, the last thing I would want to do is appear on any talk show where folks like you and me can call to express our opinion of Apple's accessibility collapse.

A few months ago, I stopped using Facebook because of some drama that was going on. After coming back to Facebook, it was fine, but as recently as just a few weeks ago, VoiceOver would randomly stop talking and then come on again, as I was scrolling through posts on FB. But apparently, it's not just FB; it happens in other apps as well. People in a group suggested restarting the phone, switching to a different voice and then switching back to my preferred voice, etc. None of that has worked. I am just about ready to throw my phone across the room!!! Using an iPhone 8 on iOS 16.6. I really, really hope this issue is fixed in iOS 17, if indeed the iPhone 8 supports it.

iOS 17 drops support for the iPhone 8, 8 plus and X. I bet there will be a 16.7 that Apple keeps updating with security fixes for phones that can't upgrade to 17, like they do for iOS 15 now. They dropped a 15.7.8 update when 16.6 got released. Can't remember what iOS 12 ended up getting up to for phones that have it as their last supported version.

13 pro and iOS 16.6. No issues ath this time.

iPhone 11 running iOS 16.6

1. my VO cursor is still jumping to the first element on the screen, and not just in 3rd party apps. It's frequent in the Podcasts app for example. I'm constantly losing my place, and if the cursor jumps right as I'm starting to double tap or even split tap, I perform an action that I didn't expect and may have no idea what action I just performed. It seems especially bad in context menus.
2. while I can get the "screen curtain on" announcement ("VO crashing"?) to stop with a low quality voice, I find these voices irritating and harder to understand.

Has there been any progress on Apple's end in fixing these bugs, especially the cursor suddenly jumping since there is no workaround?

It doesn’t look like it as 16.6 is almost certainly the last version of iOS 16 which means all the 8, XR and X users will never get a stable version of iOS. In another thread about iOS 17 bugs, users have said the issues are still there in the latest beta of iOS 17 although this doesn’t mean it will be there in the release version. I’m confused about people saying it’s a RAM issue. I’m sure thats true however it doesn’t make sense because it wasn’t happening on previous iOS releases and RAM hasn’t got smaller in the last 3 years which is how long I’ve been using Siri Australian female. Either way. Apple have seriously screwed its users on this one. Like actually really bad and they haven’t shown they care yet. Still on the plus side, the phones might not work but we’re getting point to speak so yay. The whole thing is a bad joke. Get the new features in when your OS is functional. Until then, it should be all hands to the pumps.

Both of these are quickly becoming the bane of my existance. Each version of iOS 16 seems to be making things worse. You have already described the focus issue better than I ever could. For me, the Kroger app in particular has become completely unuseable. As for the VO crashing, it's seriously weird. Sometimes, it will just randomly switch to Samantha compact for a few words, and then Alex comes back. More often than that, though, I have a fun thing happen where speech just completely disappears. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, and it's happened in a number of apps. What's weird/frustrating is that I usually have to triple click the side button 2 or 3, sometimes even 4 times before VO comes back. Then, all is well until it decides to crash again. Some days, it doesn't happen at all, and then there are other days when I experience this type of vo cras two or three times. Really, really hoping that things will be better in iOS 17. On the bright side, I almost never have any significant issues on my Apple Watch ultra. My apple TV boxes have a number of quirks, but they're nothing new, and I've just learned to deal with them and get on with life.

Some of the previous comments indicated that VO was only crashing with the higher quality voices. I am running iOS 16.6 on my iPhone XR and use Eloquence and I have also observed this crash.

Fortunately it is not happening too often, but it is frustrating when it does.

If it is a RAM thing, then maybe rebooting the phone would help.

--Pete