I honestly don't know how long this has been an issue for me, at least a year but I think much longer. For awhile I assumed this was happening to everyone but now I'm curious if it's just me or not.
Voiceover doesn't respond while Safari is loading, sometimes freezing until the page is loaded (or worse, getting caught in a stuttering loop if I have the app switcher open where it just tries to say "Safari" on repeat until I turn it off and back on). I have always assumed this is a loading behavior that us screen reader users just have to endure while sighted users can scroll a half loaded page any time.
The much more annoying issue is that at least for the past year or more even after a page has fully loaded, Voiceover won't respond for a few seconds. This has been happening on almost every website and on three different phones. I tap the screen and I get a little haptic feedback, the kind you get when there's nothing on the screen. I have some vision and there is definitely something on the screen when this happens. It's like the cursor is stuck for a second. It seems to be a loading behavior too, like Voiceover is waiting for the fully loaded page to finish loading. Again, if Voiceover is off, there's no trouble. I can scroll anything instantly, no delay, no problem.
I thought at one time this could have something to do with my ad blockers, but frankly everything is faster with them on. I have AdGuard, 1blocker, Stop the Madness, and Dark Reader on and have had various combinations of these off and on for years. Again, it doesn't seem to be the blockers doing this.
So. Does this pause after a page loads happen to anyone else? Is there a fix for it or is this yet another tedious bug?
Comments
A few questions
Hi,
For iOs/iPadOS, try this out:
1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Verbosity.
2. Set 'WebRotor Summary' to 'Do nothing'.
3. Toggle off and back on VoiceOver.
4. Try loading a webpage.
If this does not help, I would recommend you disable all extensions and try loading a webpage, just to see if there is any improvement.
HTH. 😄
Wow!!! Thanks so much.
This is one of the many bugs I’ve had for years and years. It makes using the web impossible at times, if I touch the screen before it’s finished loading then the page just won’t load at all. Problem was that loading didn’t finish when the sound said. This meant I’d have to leave the page alone for about 5 seconds every time I tapped a link. Often I’d forget and pages just wouldn’t load then I’d have to reload which sometimes wouldn’t work and if I’d just submitted a form of some kind (not that I do that often anymore because safari is so unreliable with VO) but then I’d lose what I’d done and have to start over. That has seemed to fix things at least for now. Time will tell if this is a permanent fix but it looks good so far. Thanks so much!
You are welcome
Glad I could help. And I just realized that my subject above reads as 'A few questions' when it should have been 'A few suggestions'.
Sleep deprived brain FTW. 😪
Thank you!
I'd gone into Verbosity ages ago and had no idea about the Web Router setting! That seems to have made a huge difference, thank you!
A thought.
I don’t want to do this myself because I’d be taking credit for your tip but it might be worth putting an entry on the first page with a title along the lines of Fix for safari page not loading, crashing and general stability. You might be able to do better than that but, I really think more people should know about this. It seems to have fixed a lot of my problems that it wasn’t even related to. I have a sneaky little feeling that it’s a buggy settings that has never done what it was designed to do and toggling it off seems to improve a lot of things that need improving. It’s extra annoying because over the years I’ve played around with that setting trying to get it working because a rotor summary would be quite useful but it would never work no matter how many times I tried toggling it on and off. I didn’t ever leave it off long enough to find out that it improved Safari’s stability though and thats a shame. The important thing is that your comment got me to try it and Safari is generally behaving much better now.
Front page?
Do you mean like a 'sticky'? I am actually not sure how to go about doing that on AppleVis. 😳
Hi Bryan.
No I just mean like a regular post to the front page. It’s in the menu at the top. You don’t have to obviously, I just thought it would be really helpful for those who are still having lots of problems with Safari. It would also make the solution a little more searchable.
Update
So this didn't fix the problem entirely but it has vastly reduced the frequencey of it for me. I'm going to check in Safari's experimental features just to make sure there's not something weird in there too now that I know this setting exists. I seriously had no idea what it even was. Apple needs to provide more easy to find, detailed descriptions of all these accessibility settings. I've been using iPhone for at least a decade and I find out about things I never knew with it all the time.