What’s New in VoiceOver in iOS 11

iOS 11

On Tuesday, September 19th, Apple released iOS 11, bringing with it some new VoiceOver features and improvements.

Apps

You can now drag and drop apps using VoiceOver To do this, do the following:

  1. While on the home screen, double tap and hold to enter edit mode.
  2. Find an app you wish to move.
  3. Set the VoiceOver rotor to”actions” if it’s not done automatically and flick up or down to “drag app name.”
  4. Navigate to where you wish to drop the app and choose an option. You can drop an app before the app that the VoiceOver cursor is focused on, after it, or create a folder containing the focused app and the one you’re dragging. If you wish to drag more than one app, you can choose the final option. This is to “Add To Drag Session.” You can use this method do drag files from one app to another minus the double tap and hold.

Verbosity

VoiceOver includes several new verbosity settings you can now change. They are located by tapping Settings>General>Accessibility>VoiceOver>Verbosity.

These options include:

  • Speak hints. This setting is on by default. Double tapping this setting will turn them off.
  • Punctuation. After double tapping this option, you can choose to set it to all, some, or none.
  • Speak detect text. This determines whether automatically detected text in the focused item is spoken. For example: If you are on an app with an unlabeled button, VoiceOver will announce something like “Button. Possible text: View menu.”
  • Capital letters: This option will change what VoiceOver does when encountering a capital letter. You can choose from speak cap, play sound, change pitch, and do nothing.
  • Deleting text: You can choose from speak, play sound, change pitch, and do nothing.
  • Embedded links: You can choose from speak, Play sound, change pitch, or do nothing.
  • There is a table output heading with options related to the reading of tables.
  • You can toggle reading of table headers and row and column numbers.
  • As in iOS 10, you can turn the emoji suffix on or off, depending on whether or not you want VoiceOver to speak the word “Emoji” when one is encountered.

Mail

You no longer need to three-finger tap on a message to hear the preview.

When reading a message, you have VoiceOver actions to reply, archive, flag, mark as read/unread, and to activate.

If you use threaded messaging, you have a rotor option, “Expand/Collapse Thread”. When expanded, you can manage all of the messages inside a thread on an individual basis.

Smart Actions Rotor

VoiceOver in iOS 11 now has a new feature that allows for the user to continue to use the last used actions rotor item. This is useful for deleting large amounts of messages. This feature also appears in the App Switcher

What have we missed?

Know something that is not on this list? Please let us know by emailing us at feedback@iaccessibility.net or tweet us at @iaccessibility1

#iACast Special: New Features in iOS 11

iOS 11

In this episode, Matt, Jason, Shawn, and Aleeha talk about the bugs new features of iOS 11 in this iACast special podcast.

Features include

  • New Siri Voices
  • Verbosity settings in VoiceOver
  • Changes to Control Center
  • Braille Support

Known iOS 11 Bugs

iOS 11

Each year, Apple releases a new version of iOS with new features which change the operating system in ways that can cause bugs for users. While we all wish this did not happen it is inevitable, and it is good to know what works and what does not work, so in this article, you will find what we have found to be known bugs in iOS 11.

  • iPad multitasking with split view apps is broken currently with VoiceOver. Workaround can be found at https://iaccessibility.net/guide-getting-around-ipad-multitasking-bug-ios11/
  • Zoom will not rotate between portrait and landscape properly all the time. This occurs when the device is rotated to landscape and back to portrait. Sometimes, the device will rotate back to portrait but the zoom window will stay in a landscape state.
  • A VoiceOver bug has been found that causes drag and drop of icons to not work correctly in the Dock and on the Home screen This causes the entire device to hang for an unpredictable amount of time, and is not always seen to happen. Only known fix is to reset your device’s settings.
  • A VoiceOver bug has been found that causes Messages on iOS to say, “null” when a conversation is deleted. This does not display visually but does show with VoiceOver. @mcourcel on Twitter reports that closing Messages after deleting a conversation fixes the null conversation.
  • A bug has been found that causes iOS to relaunch Springboard when a user activates the App Switcher or opens an app from the App Switcher while VoiceOver is running. This does not happen if VoiceOver is not running. and does not always happen when switching apps.

What bugs have you found? Let us know and we will post them here. To send us your bugs, email us at feedback@iaccessibility.net or tweet us at @iaccessibility1 on Twitter.

#iACast 45 – Test it up to 11!

iOS 11

On this episode of the iA Cast Aleeha, Jason, and Michael discuss the iOS 11 beta and share their thoughts on the first build. iOS 11 beta 2 for developers has been released since this recording bringing a lot of fixes while also introducing a few new bugs. The public beta for iOS 11 has also been released at beta.apple.com. Head over there to enroll your device.

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