I find that Voiceover will very frequently stop speaking mid sentence or mid word. This is usually, but not always, on a webpage. It usually happens when moving through elements with VO right and left or just left and right with quick nav. Focus will land on a block of text and Voiceover will read fine for a while and after a seemingly random period of time, it will just stop. It does not require a VO restart to get it talking again. It just stops reading that element. I can move to another block of text or back to the same one and the behavior may or may not repeat. This started when I updated to Big Sur, which is what I am still running. I use Alex as my voice. Have others seen this and does anyone have any idea as to the cause or how to stop it? Does it get better or worse in later versions of Mac OS?
Comments
Re: Voiceover stops talking
yes, I have noticed this for a long time now in the past few versions of iOS 16.
I particularly notice this when doing a two finger swipe down to read a story in the Apple News app. Sometimes Voiceover will get totally confused and lose focus when it reaches a video, particularly if it is embedded in a Tweet.
This also happens, however, when performing the two finger swipe down to read continuously in a news article when reading just the text. Suddenly voiceover will stop on a word. Another two finger swipe down will usually then continue reading.
This is very annoying and frustrating behavior.
As you said, the same thing happens in other apps just when swiping left and right. For example I can swipe write to navigate through the stock quotes on my Apple Stock app. Sometimes Voiceover will correctly read a line sucn as:
Dow Jones Industrials 33,109
However, randomly, at other times when swiping to the same element Voiceover will say:
Dow Joens Industrials
and not speak the price unless I swipe write again.
Does anyone at Apple ever debug this stuff? I think such problems are getting worse. I have certainly notified Apple accessibility about some of these issues a long time ago, but they don't seem to get fixed.
This is certainly not a "delightful" experience for the user when these issues happen and persist from update to update.
--Pete
Regarding VoiceOver stops talking
I started having this problem with the Alex voice on my Ipad Mini fifth generation when Ipad OS 16 came out. I changed to the Samantha voice, and the problem went away. I tried deleting the Alex voice in order to redownload it, but for some unknown reason the voice would not delete from my device. Someday when I'm feeling energetic I may try erasing and resetting my device to see if that fixes the problem, but for now I must use the Samantha voice. Also note that I am using the Alex voice on an Iphone, and a couple of old Intel Macbooks with no problems.