VoiceOver reading text out of order in iOS 8.3

By Qball42, 16 April, 2015

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hello everyone, I recently upgraded to iOS 8.3 and, generally, I love it. However, I am having one problem that is a little more than a minor annoyance. Lately, voiceOver has been reading text in third party apps out of the order that it has followed within said apps in the past. At first, I thought this was an app specific issue, but I have now experienced this in three different apps, and I believe it correlates with the upgrade from 8.2 to 8.3. I have not seen any mention of this bug elsewhere, but I thought I would ask just in case to see if anyone else is experiencing this. If so, can you offer any solutions or work-arounds? It is just a minor issue, but it has certainly made the experience within the apps that is affects much less intuitive and more painful. I should add that I am experiencing this bug on my 32 gigabyte iPhone 5s. I have not yet had the chance to see if I experience it on any other device.

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Comments

By LaBoheme on Friday, April 24, 2015 - 23:27

this happens when text is formated in columns but the columns are not all leveled. instead of acknowledging she is just a computer program and read the text from left to right faithfully, vo trys to determine which should be read first, not knowing she is making herself a laughingstock.
vo does use this strategy in other places, such as a checkbox at the left side of an item. vo usually read the item first then the checkbox, it works fine in those instances. the latest implementation is a different story. not sure the best way to explain this to apple, i think the easiest way is to let them run the affected apps and have them listen for themselves.

By splyt on Friday, April 24, 2015 - 23:27

Once again Apple goes unbilievably mad about such implementations.
At least this is something that the whole industry of assistive technology has gone through, not something that only Apple suffers as most part of the accessibility related bugs os IOS and Mac.

As an example, I can not remember the last time navigation on internet was broken with none of the four, five major screen readers on windows. And when I say broken I mean instances where tables won't be recognized, as is the case of safari and other software using html view Apple native components with voiceover after some simple update either on the OS or on thhe SR.

As for this specific bug, it's clear that Apple is relying on something it hasn't before to determine order of text to be read.
While they probably had their set of reazons to do that change, it would be obvious even to a non tech person that this change would probably break the reading of some applications, some of them that might be extremely important to custommers lifes either for intertainment or work purposes and some of them that might not go through an update process only to comply to thhe new, undocumented requirements introduced to correct determination of text reading order Apple has just silently specified.
What they do thou?
1- Warn people that this kind of thing is likely to happen so that they mightt decide not to u´pdate ****** wrong response!
2- As this is something with a high potential of problems, make a switch in VO to change between the two reading modes, so that one can choose what is better to them in specific cenarius **** wrong response!
3- Even more, as it will be something that will work for some applications and not work for others, create a specific group of settings applicable for each app running (something I have been asking for long time specially on mac but also on IOS) ... ***** wroooooooooong response!
4- Do nothing and break the usability of apps that might be excential for customers ******* you scored!!!

That's it. Hope Google will work hard and give us a decent screen reader, because VO will get totally unuseable for production / serious work one of these days and there won't remaining nothing to do.

By Missy Hoppe on Friday, April 24, 2015 - 23:27

Hello. I just wanted to confirm this... bug? new feature? I've noticed it most in certain parts of the diceworld, Godville and trivia crack apps. It's probably present in other apps too, but I haven't noticed it yet. It's not a deal breaker by any means, but as someone who isn't a fan of change, I find it rather frustrating.