YouTube, VoiceOver and iOS.

I've noticed this too, (running 15.6 on a 2nd-gen SE), and it's driving me nuts. Weirdly it only seems to occur on the YouTube home tab, when I perform a search or go into my subscriptions, I get all the results and don't have trouble playing videos or opening channels. Hopefully this is resolved once iOS 16 comes out, or in a future app update.

this is a youtube problem not an iOs version problem. I have the issue on both versions of iOs 16 and 15. the broke the home tab as well as the scroling thing as well. Bleh. I don't use youtube on iOs that much anyway, still though I'd love to see this fixed.

It is driving me insane, every single time I try, it only shows a few items, and every single time I try to scroll, it just says page 1 of 4 and just let me move onwards. They better fix this soon.

Having the same issue after the last update. I have reviewed the youtube app in the app store and addressed this on there. Will also send youtube support a ticket. hopefully they fix this soon. I love watching youtube lol.

Glad I'm not the only one. I thought I was going crazy. I kept closing and reopening the app thinking something was going on with my phone.

I'm having the same problems with YouTube. Videos are also autoplaying, even when I have the setting turned off. It's awful.

I now can’t access any video’s below the breaking news section so I have access to 2 video’s. I pay £15.99 a month I think and YouTube know about VO users. This isn’t ok.

Yes. I just noticed this a couple days ago myself in the home tab. Here’s a workaround that at least temporary restores normal behavior: turn off voice over and then single finger swipe down repeatedly until you get some haptic feedback indicating that the feed has refreshed. Now turn voiceover back on and the feed should behave normally, at least for the time being. Next time you come back to it it will probably be broken again.
This comes on top of the serious bug I already posted about earlier where the text box for comments and replies under videos is no longer accessible, leaving you with no easy way to preview what you’ve just typed before posting. I’ve also reported this to YouTube and still nothing. This is aggravating, especially since I’m giving them $10 a month for a premium subscription.

I haven’t been able to like and dislike comments either recently.

One user mentioned this over in the main YouTube app entry on Applevis. A sort of work around is to go into the YouTube app and, after landing on the first video, turn off Voiceover. After you do that, do a one-finger swipe down, wait about a second, and then turn Voiceover back on. That seems to unlock the scrolling problem. Don't ask me how or why they figured that out, but it does seem to work. You will have to do that every time you open the app after closing it in the app switcher.

PS: Andy, I think Youtube and Audible must have the same programmers. They both seem to find new and innovative ways to f--- up accessibility with every update.

I also mentioned that workaround in an earlier reply here. The reason it works is it's forcing the Home tab to refresh its feed. Normally this could be done with VoiceOver by swiping down with three fingers, but like many things in the YouTube app, for some reason this doesn't work, so we must resort to doing it the sighted way. I have enough vision to see the feed, at least see where the rectangles of color are that are videos to sighted people, and even with VO off, you can't scroll the feed when it's stuck in that state, so this may well be an actual YouTube issue affecting sighted users. Fingers crossed it is because they'll actually jump on it.

Thanks very much for this. I just tried it and it worked great. Still got all the other problems but at least I can access video’s. Thanks again.

Thank you for sharing the work around that helped me a lot, I don’t know if it’ll fix any of the rest of the problems but we’ll see thank you so much

I received an update last night from YouTube, but sadly none of the issues were fixed. It is inexcusable. I am thinking of presenting in my next e-mail the position that if programmers at YouTube are not competent enough to fix accessibility bugs, what other areas of the app suffer from incompetents?

It’s super frustrating and inexcusable indeed, but I still try to assume positive intent. As a software engineer myself, I can only imagine how massive the feature request and bug fix list must be for those teams, so it’s a realistic possibility they simply haven’t gotten to it yet. Also, the sad reality is, accessibility bugs probably don’t receive as much priority as those that affect the broader user base. I’d say we all just keep contacting Google accessibility until we see results.

Hi, I understand the reasoning behind your reasonableness however there comes a time when reality comes crashing in and we have to say this isn’t good enough. They may have many features to support but they are one of the largest companies on the planet and we aren’t that small a user base. If they are going to charge us for it, they’d better support making their products work properly. They are large enough to do that if they made a decision to. The fact that they don’t means only that they haven’t. IMHO.

Sure. I absolutely agree, and just to offer context to my reply… The user above me was seemingly suggesting contacting YouTube and accusing the developers of incompetence. Whether or not that’s true, that doesn’t seem like a productive step. If I misunderstood what that user was actually suggesting, my mistake. Just to reiterate what I said at the end of my previous comment, we should continue hammering Google accessibility until this and other issues get fixed.

I probably agree with you that that particular action might not be productive but then again it might be. I’m not going to judge because I know I’v been incredibly frustrated in the past. Maybe it’s time they felt a little more pressure than polite contact constantly requesting they fix things. I am sure that if accessibility was important it would be considered when changes were made as a matter of course It seems clear thats going to be the end point when these issues go away but I don’t know how to hasten that process.

It is incompetence. They have a product to deliver to a range of products and users. If they aren’t competently doing that then I guess he’s justified in calling them out.

I am also facing this issue from one week. I am not using YouTube app completely. I am using the Web version of it. It resolved most of my issues with the YouTube application.

While it's nice to know that I'm not the only person experiencing this issue I want to encourage those of you who want this issue resolved to send feedback by activating the Send Feedback button from within YouTube. The easiest way to locate the button is to move focus to the title of the first video and then swipe once to the left.

I always use the Feedback button in the YouTube app but I need to also reach out to Google accessibility. Sometimes I just don’t want to dig through their website to find the form, so having this email address is helpful. As far as which one to do, I say we should do both. The more ways we can communicate these problems to them, the more the chances are that somebody will see our feedback and actually do something

Earlier, I suggested calling YouTube out on incompetence in programming and suggested that if they do not have the competence to fix accessibility issues, what else do they lack competence to do for mainstream users. A lot of this comes from frustration at companies like Google and Amazon. Most of it actually comes from Amazon. I assume most of you know, but in case you don't, Amazon Music desktop player and apps, not website, has the ability to play music in very high res audio. However, their desktop app has a whole host of unlabeled buttons, and more than half the time you finally find the track you want to play, their "keyboard shortcuts" do not work as advertised. Not only that, there is no list of keyboard shortcuts that I can find in the desktop app. I'm sure many of you are probably thinking "well, just use custom labels". Great idea in theory. However, in order to label a button, you must know what the button does. also, many of the buttons use the same graphic number which leads me to believe that the buttons would then be mislabeled. I have gone back and forth with Amazon's so-called "accessibility support" team, and their final suggestion was to just use the web player as it was more accessible. The rocket scientists missed the point, that is, if I'm going to pay for amazon high res music, I expect and demand to have access to high res music on my platform of choice. Anyway, rant over. I was angry the other night because I see the same thing happening with google and YouTube, that is, ridiculous errors that keep popping up that any competent accessibility team would notice when testing versions of the app. Look at how long it took Google to fix the bug with YouTube where you couldn't like or dislike or share videos on their iPhone app. It took at least a month. I see Google taking the same lacadaisicle approach as Amazon when it comes to fixing bugs, and therefore I truly do call it incompetence. Hope that explains my point a little better.

Surprise surprise, no change as of yet.

Unbelievable. We had to wait so long between updates, and yet still no resolutions to the various bugs we’ve been reporting. Also, in addition, now when you are trying to type a comment there’s a bunch of emojis above the usual auto suggestions and I keep accidentally hitting them instead of the send button. Maybe there’s a way to hide these. Haven’t poked around yet. Still, it’s like let’s just keep throwing gasoline on the inaccessibility fire

I started noticing this issue right after updating to iOS 16, so I thought that was the culprit. Thinking back though, I think I updated a bunch of apps before installing the iOS update, so the YouTube update that broke things probably was included in the app updates I did. Thanks so much for the workaround! My wife will be very happy as she was my workaround previously! I would turn off VO, and ask her to see if anything changed. She said all she did was click on the "All" button, but that's the button I always click on, and it did nothing for me. More than likely she was refreshing the feed without knowing it. Thanks again, and glad to know it's not an iOS 16 issue.

Wel apart from the commenting thing where you can't read your comment but just for playing videos it works fine.

i'm able to flick and scroll up with three fingers and tap on videos to play.

I'm also on the latest version as far as I know, I asked siri to download youtube and instead of update it says open so I don't understand the issue people are having?

No joy with the latest update. Problem is still there. Normally, I’d just switch to watching YT on my AppleTV. But, tvOS16 hasbroken the ability to turn off voiceover, so it’s just stuffed everywhere.

Using an SE running IOS16. If I go to the top of the YouTube Home Screen and select Explore you will get more results.

I just upgraded from a 2020 iPhone SE to the new iPhone 14 and naïvely thought maybe somehow this would magically make things work better. Nope. I think we can absolutely, conclusively say this is 100% a YouTube problem.. BTW, this isn’t why I upgraded LOL. In re-reading my comment, it almost sounded that way. For what it’s worth, I do like the new phone, though the camera is bulky as hell! Hopefully I can find a good case that makes that not so Protruding

Youtube really does seam to work fine for me apart from the comments.

TLDR: the home tab doesn’t scroll reliably, meaning folks can only access three or four videos before having to turn off voiceover and do a manual refresh. More details in above replies, if you’re interested.

That's interesting because it works completely fine for me.

What happens if you go to the shorts tab, then back to the home tab, can you fflick right through the videos then?

Yeah, I see why people are irritated now, I'm irritated now ::)

I'll probably complain to the google disability support team on BeMyEyes and go through writing them an email and all that and see what happens.

Sorry if my reply referring you to past replies seemed snarky. Not my intent. :)

You're right :) reading replies always helps.

I still have the issue on v17.37.3

I checked my current YouTube version and it’s 17.36.3 which was released about a week ago. I see that the latest version is 17.37.3 but I am not given the option to update, and when I visit the App Store I can’t find anywhere to download the latest version. Does this perhaps require iOS 16?

Open the App Store, select my account, then swipe down with three fingers to refresh the screen. This should allow you to see new updates.

Thanks. That worked like a charm. I guess I would expect the app to refresh itself when I open it but evidently not. :)

However, I guess this is why they call it a manual update. Lol.

I am now running version 17.37.3 but unfortunately I am still experiencing the same issue where the home tab locks up and won’t scroll past the first several videos. I’ve even tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app but no luck.

I've updated and it worked fine.

It's working for me, I have youtube premium, so I wonder if that's why it works?

It’s fixed for me too, and I do not have You Tube Premium.
Dave

I don’t think YouTube premium would matter either way, but I do have it for whatever that’s worth. I’m on an iPhone SE 2020 version and I’m not running iOS 16 yet because I don’t know if this little phone could handle it, lol. I’ll be getting the new SE in a week or so, so hopefully that will clear up my issues. I’m not sure what else would be causing the difference

I realized the only thing I hadn’t tried was actually restarting the phone, one of the most obvious troubleshooting steps that I seem to always forget. Lol. The home tab is currently working, but I’ve had this happen before only to come back to the app later in the day and find that it is exhibiting the buggy behavior again, so we will see