Question about listening to music on the Apple Watch with the AirPods

At present, the situation with using AirPods, with an iPhone and an Apple Watch both running Voiceover is not great.

There are many excellent aspects of the AirPods as compared to other earpieces and headsets, , which I'm not discussing here, but if you use Voiceover with AirPods and the Apple Watch - then you will likely be somewhat disappointed at present.

As far as I can tell, Voiceover on the iPhone is holding on to the AirPods connection, even after speech has stopped and even after the iPhone is locked. The result of this is that there is no auto-switching of the AirPods to the Watch, as Apple advertises and as happens for non Voiceover users.

So, interestingly, The AirPods aren't demonstrating the baseline level of device switching connectivity offered by numerous multi-point Bluetooth headsets, such as the Trex Titanium. This is a great disappointment and diminishes the usefulness of an Apple Watch running Voiceover.

If I turn off Voiceover on the iPhone and lock it, the AirPods connect to the Watch and play its output.

There are situations where the AirPods kind-of auto-connect to the Watch or the iPhone, but in this instance Watch Voiceover is truncated and there is not effective hand-over of the AirPods between devices.

Note, while AirPods audio lag on the iPhone is reasonably minimal and doesn't greatly impact efficiency on the iPhone, Lag is quite long on the Apple Watch, perhaps over half a second..

The other issue with Bluetooth and in fact all audio on the Apple Watch running Voiceover is that Voiceover aggressively ducks any audio to a much lower volume, even after Voiceover has stopped speaking. When the Watch makes the lock sound the ducking is engaged again for another 30 seconds or so.

The up-shot, Don't plan on using your Watch as an audio player, for watch content, the ducking is way too intrusive and aggressive and is held far too long. It destroys music enjoyment.

This aggressive ducking behaviour also makes reviewing recordings from Just Press Record and podcast playback via the 'Watch Player' app unsatisfactory. To comfortably listen to audio from the Watch, , you need to turn off Voiceover in order to listen to audio with clarity.

I've submitted a bug report to Apple Accessibility about this ducking issue, but so far, no fix in the latest beta cycle and current watch 3.13 release.

The second issue that ties in with this is that as you adjust music or audio playback volume on the Watch, Voiceover loudly speaks the volume percentage, once again ducking the music, making it impossible to actually know the level you have now set the music to.

If, alternatively, you wish to use the Watch music app to play music from your phone, then the AirPods will auto-switch back to your phone once you start music playback, and Watch Voiceover is then output via the Watch speaker. If you pause the music, The AirPods are once-again connected to the Watch.

So in summary, audio stored on the Watch is currently far from ideal for Voiceover users, but accessing your Phone's music store works relatively well.

Similarly, you can use Now Playing on the Watch to control audio playback of music and other iPhone audio, but the Watch speaks through its internal speaker.

If you have a Mac and wish to use your AirPods with it, I recommend the Toothfairy app that allows you to set a hotkey to auto-connect the AirPods to the Mac. This saves a lot of fiddle.

You'll then need to bring them back to the iPhone in the control centre, which takes quite a few swipes.

This is where the iPhone audio output rotor setting would come in very handy, but - for now - it disconnects the AirPods, but for some reason, you can't use it to reconnect them again.
To do that, remove them from your ears and re-insert them.