VoiceOver bugs in iOS 4.3

When opening some folders VoiceOver does not switch its focus to the newly opened folder.

What happens is that if you flick right after opening a folder, VoiceOver will read as if you are still on the home screen. It will not read the first item in the folder, as you would normally expect, but will read the folder or app that is to the right of the folder you have just opened.

To switch VoiceOver's focus to items in the folder you need to touch on the lower half of the screen. When you now flick to the left or right, VoiceOver should start to read the items in the folder.

This does not happen for all folders, and it has been suggested that it is linked to the folder's position on the home screen (in terms of row and column). However, I have found this behaviour to be inconsistent on an iPhone 4. Some times a folder will open as normal, but at other times the same folder will exhibit this bug.

When typing in some textfields the iDevice randomly makes the noise you normally hear when you flick to the first or last element on a page.

Although the noise itself might be confusing and mildly annoying, it does not appear to have any effect on the actual entry of text.

Using iOS 4.3 on an iPhone 4 there is some very strange behaviour on the search page of the App Store (the iOS app, not the website).

This bug is evident when you have double tapped on the textfield at the top of the screen. At this point the page has three main areas:

1. the text entry box
2. a dynamically updated list of search results
3. the onscreen keyboard

When flicking through the list of dynamic search results (this is before you have double tapped on the 'Search' button on the keyboard) VoiceOver will correctly read the list of items. However, after the last of these items VoiceOver will read the contents of the App Store page that was loaded prior to your activating the textfield.

If the last page was an app description VoiceOver will read this in full. After reading 'Report a problem', VoiceOver will move its focus to the keyboard.

If you double tap on the screen whilst VoiceOver focus appears to be on an active element from that app description (such as the Ratings button), it will not be actioned. I have yet to determine a clear pattern to what actually happens, but it seems to either select a key from the keyboard or an item from the dynamic list.

If the last page you viewed was a list of search results, VoiceOver will start to read this after it has read the dynamically listed search results.

In this last scenario there appear to be two distinct patterns of behaviour. If the list of search results is quite short VoiceOver will switch focus to the keyboard once it has read the last item in the list. However, in the case of long lists VoiceOver will actually switch back to the page showing the list of previous search results when you are flicking through what should be the list of dynamic search results. This appears to happen when you flick to the second 'shadow' item that VoiceOver announces from the 'shadow' page.

This was quite a difficult bug to explain, but hopefully you can follow what I have tried to describe above.

I would be interested to hear if others are able to replicate this bug.