iOS 18 Beta Comprehensive Bugs/Accessibility Issues Thread

I notice this in just about any app that requires activation of controls. It doesn't register links being tapped in Safari, for example, until the app is restarted.

Hello,

When I use the gesture "swipe down with two fingers" to read a text with voice-over. My iPhone starts reading the text but after some lines he stops reading and just says "screen curtain on".
Does someone else have the same problem?

I discovered my screen orientation was unlocked, so I locked it into away mode, and everything's fine

Can you use your own personal voice with voiceover now? If so, I'm upgrading to try it out!!!

Saw a youtube with it and looks like yes. Do not know how good it is but you can play let us know.

Here is a recording I did a couple weeks ago to surprise Denise when she got back from out of town. I will warn you, this will drain your battery.

https://tweesecake.social/@wiljames/112610102772587786

why is the personal voice not available for those outside the US? what about all the other languages voiceover supports? i live in the Uk and don't want a fake u.s accent just to have it working has ios 18 changed this?

Wow! from listening to the personal voice, as well as extra voiceover improvements, sounds cool. If anyone is running it on there main devices, is it normal? let me know.;

Hi everyone. After a bit of fear I have now switched from iOS 17 to iOS 18 beta. Never has a better choice been made! First of all, the stammering or stuttering bug, which I was embarrassed about because it didn't bother everyone and I couldn't make it understand, has finally been solved, even with Eloquence!
Furthermore, the flick seems more stable to me. The braille command mode is crazy, and can be navigated very quickly. Having said this, I do not take responsibility for those who, reading my post, update to the beta and then want to go back, as there are small bugs, such as sometimes VoiceOver goes silent, but just reload it for everything to return to normal.

One last thing. I read about a user talking about Seeing AI, and the fact that it doesn't work. Simply uninstall and reinstall the app, and everything works fine.

have they improved eloquence at all in ios 18?

Yes it is better.

The fact the stammering bug has been fixed, has me seriously considering installing the beta. Will definitely give it some thought before jumping right in, but thank you for what you posted. At least there's hope!

Yes, in my opinion the stammering bug started with an audio change they made last year. Glad they were able to fix it. I'm holding on to it and wouldn't go back.

Wow!! I'm typing this on an older iPhone using the iOS 18 beta. It's awesome having BSI activate as soon as I open an edit field. Only thing I'm noticing right now is that VO is reading everything on Applevis twice. But it's sooo unbelievably peaceful not having to deal with the stammering issue!!

What improvements they have made to Eloquence in iOS 18?

I am hoping eloquence sounds like it used to on the older nokia phones and that apostrophe when reading out what people say is gone away

For those asking about Eloquence. The voice is the same, there are no changes. But for me and others, who noticed a stutter, especially when flicking quickly, this stutter has disappeared. For me it's a big improvement, but of course those who haven't noticed anything in iOS 17 won't notice anything.
If you will, a big change is the audio attenuation. For example, if you use apps like Instagram or Tiktok, where there are videos with loud audio, with this option you can activate the fact that when VoiceOver speaks, the disturbing audio will be temporarily lowered.

ah so the sample rate still the same? not using it in 18 then as the quality far superior when it is used on an android phone that can take it.

So no other changes in iOS 18 compared to iOS 17 in general? all performance on devices are normal?

There have not been too many changes in iOS 18 compared to iOS 17 as of now, we did however get the new Passwords app, and the ability to lock apps with Face ID/touch ID, no major changes to Siri yet, Apple intelligence has not came yet either, however for the last three versions of iOS we have got new apps that have been introduced, in iOS 16 we got the Freeform app, in iOS 17 we got the Journal app, and in the iOS 18 beta, we got the Passwords app, The VoiceOver audio ducking options have been changed, so rather than it being just an on and off toggle, we now have the options for off, duck when speaking, or always duck, for some reason, though, UK eloquence does not have community dictionaries like the US version does, but other than that, that is all of the major changes, I hope someone found this useful

What's the difference on the audio ducking changes?

You can have voiceover volume louder than anything that is playing. You can have it always duck. You can have it never duck that is off. You can have it only duck when speaking. You can also have louder volumes.

RCS is working now, still have bugs but is working. Those nice people who are beta testing let us know how is working.

I assume all the described audio-ducking options are tied in with Activities? In other words, can I have different apps and contexts use individual audio-ducking settings?

I am unable to drag apps on the home screen on iOS 18 beta two. There is no drop app before or after option in the rotor.

I also have the same problem, and I have already reported it: FB14117188. They will definitely correct it.

Guys like I know that rcs should have been there 3 5 7 years ago but it's finally there so just please? And the braille screen input improvements are not nothing. Yes only ipad users will get the most of it but still. I can totally understand being a bit disappointed a bit by macos as I am myself but ios? Not so. Aside AI rcs is probably the biggest thing even if they just mentioned it for 3 seconds or so. And the other updates across apple ecosystem are not minor either. Like apple watch it's quite nice wwhat we'll get.

Edit:
Thanks for the demo of voiceover and personal voice, I will certainly try this out.

Watch ring tones. Also having the power to change tone on the watch is a major big deal and notification sounds on the watch. Now you can not do so. Heard that siri might be improve in general even if you will not able to use Apple intellegint, just the regular siri. Although I would love new voices in English, using personal voice for VO is a big deal. Have a wonderful friend and she has a beautiful voice and will ask her to creat a personal voice in my phone. Wished this was possible long time, there was a wonderful news lady with the voice of a goddess and would had love to ask her to do the personal voice. Now those of you have a wife you can get her voice for VO unless you do not like her voice.

Haha :)

So there is a bug in the second beta where accessing Speech settings (Settings > Accessiblity > VoiceOver > Speech) where you can't access the screen anymore. Settings just quits instantly. This used to be an issue with the equalizer, but that caused the Settings app to hang for a bit, and then crash. Is anyone else having this issue?
I can also confirm that Seeing AI does not open on iOS 18 at the moment.
Additionally, editing the homescreen no longer allows me to drop items, but this interesting Options button appears, which for some reason when I press it, it does nothing.
I've also been experiencing strange issues with dragging and dropping. Once I was trying to drag a file in the Files app to another folder. When I attempted to find Actions, it caused VoiceOver to just crash. I was able to duplicate it, and I also noticed it happened when dragging text as well.
It also seems like some of these crashes also extend to apps like Safari and YouTube. I'm not sure if a certain element type is triggering it, but it's quite strange.

Has anyone played around with Activities on the beta? Onek, it seems like naming an activity is challenging. It takes the first character, then drops out of the text field or something. There's a lag with the header of a few screens. The header should reflect the name of the activity, but if you change the name, it doesn't update. And there are similar problems with changing a voice. The header, which should have the name of the voice, says default instead. And after you've changed the voice and returned to the previous screen, it the button to change the voice is still labeled with the previous voice.

This is going to be a bear to file as a bug report, so I wanted to see if anyone else is experiencing it, or is it just me.

Okay, open (for example) Messages, and then say, "Hey SIRI, what can I do here?" For pretty much as long as I can remember, SIRI would respond with helpful suggestions, like, you can say read my messages, or send a message to Jim.

On the beta, SIRI responds I'm here to help, get to know SIRI at Apple.com. I understand they're redesigning SIRI to add the ability to act more like your iDevice manual, but I didn't expect a step backwards while this development was being done.

Would like to add that I am facing the same issue with naming of activities on Latest stable release of IOS on my 15Pro Max.
It's picking up only first alphabet of whatever I try to type, despight the edit box showing the full-text.
Since this is my first IPhone, it took me a bit of time to get the hang of it. Activities feature sounds very similar to configuration profiles on NVDA. It all Sounds very useful, but since I can't name them properly, I am just not using them that much yet.

Alright, I'll try to formulate what's going wrong with Activities into a Feedback report. Wish me luck.

For some reason, I'm unable to open the Item Chooser, with neither my Logitech K380 pressing VO+I, nor my Humanware Brailliant pressing Space+dots 2, 4, nor with BSI in command mode pressing dots 2, 4. And I'm trying to figure out if this has been broken all along, or is this some new incorrect behavior that even a force reboot doesn't seem to fix. There's no discussion here of a similar issue. Anyone else experiencing it?

Here's the reproducer steps for the activities bug report. Sorry I didn't copy the issue#. Long weekend.

1. Turn on VoiceOver. Using your Bluetooth keyboard, enable quick nav by pressing left and right arrow keys simultaneously.
2. Navigate to Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, Activities.
3. Select (up+down arrow) Add Activity..
4. Focus lands on Speaking Rate, which seems odd. I would expect it to land on the Name text field. This is only the first of many things to go wrong.
5. Navigate to the name field. It is pre-populated with the text “Activity 1”. Select (up+down arrow) this field. You’ll hear the downward sound indicating quick nav is disabled. VoiceOver goes into edit mode and says, “Insertion point at end.” This seems wrong. I would expect VoiceOver to read “activity 1, contents selected.”
But this is more a suggestion than a bug..
6. Press Command+A to select the default “Activity 1” text.
7. Next, attempt to enter a new name, “Talk Like Evan.” Expected behavior: The name field will contain the text “Talk Like Evan.” Observed behavior: After the T, I hear a sound effect I’ve never heard before, and focus leaves the text field. The resulting activity name is “t.”
8. Try it again, starting from step 5. It correctly changes the activity name.
9. Find the back button just before the first heading, and select it, which returns you to the activities screen. Navigate through the list of activities. Expected: You should find an activity named “Talk Like Evan.” Observed: The activity is still named “Activity 1.”

hey everyone,
Very interesting behaviour after updating to beta 3 of IOS 18.
If you go to the bottom of your iPhone in the middle and swipe up for the app switcher, you will get the type to Siri dialogue.
I'm not sure if this is a bug or not.

The workaround is to swipe straight up from the bottom left corner of your screen and then, you will get the app switcher.

I noticed a bug o multiple iOS 18 devices when you record a video on Snapchat and send it appears to be lagging for the person you send it to but in my camera roll it’s perfectly fine . Does this happen to all devices or just lucky coincidence that me and my friends have the exact same problem.

Moving apps on the home screen has been fixed. Also the equalizer bug has been fixed, although you will experience choppy behavior when making equalizer adjustments with Siri and personal voices. Come to think of it, I had choppy behavior when using Eloquence as well. They will iron that out, I'm sure.

I wrote this when beta 1 came out, and I think that people on this forum wondering whether to upgrade might find this useful. There are some foot notes as a couple of things have been fixed, so I will add those below. Too Long, Can't Read (TLCR, lol,) pretty much every headlining feature of iOS 18 for sighted users has been utterly inaccessible. Again, some of these have been fixed, but if you want the details, please keep reading.

Home screen customisation, control centre customisation and expanded connectivity controls and messages tap backs, as well as live recognition, do not work with VoiceOver
In order to avoid writing ten separate pieces of feedback, I have decided to condense all of this information into one large piece of feedback. All of the items in the title have strange labelling at best, and are completely inaccessible at worst. Let’s start with the home screen and control centre customisation.
Home screen
• Editing apps looks the same as it always has done, with no indication from VoiceOVer of where the empty spaces are where you can put an app. If you can put them anywhere you like, a VoiceOver user should be able to see these spots so that he doesn’t have to manually drag and drop, potentially accidentally creating folders and wasting a whole load more time than necessary if using VoiceOver’s built in drag and drop.
• There is only one item in the actions menu for dropping items after you select them for drag, and that’s called drop after. Whether this works correctly is currently unknown, but this should not be the case, instead there being two options, one for dropping before and one for dropping after.
• There is no available option for colours or dark mode icons if you’re a VoiceOver user. This is not as high a priority for us as we’re blind, but it is still useful to have this ability should we want to change the look for a sighted person who might use the phone briefly.

Control centre
• Editing control centre icons, though appearing at first glance to be accessible, is not. Although the “drag item” action is available, you cannot drop it anywhere, there only being an option to cancel drag. One should be able to drop these items before or after the VoiceOver cursor just like in the home screen. You can still drag and drop manually, but sometimes other items will move without your knowledge, for example, dropping the silent mode control, currently next to torch, next to the volume button, and finding that the torch icon has moved too even though you hadn’t touched it.
• Adding icons is a train wreck. If you swipe to the item and double tap, nothing happens. You must use touch screen, but VoiceOver does not play the usual sound to indicate focus on the control, instead you have to just hear the control and double tap, hoping that the item adds like it should. And beware that the cursor might jump to the bottom of the list (The wallet control centre items,) when that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for. You should be able to add these controls by just navigating to them and double tapping, or selecting the drag action and then dropping it where you would like it to be. But the current system is finicky at best.
• Long pressing any of the connectivity switches, or choosing “open controls” from the action rotor, brings you to a screen with unlabelled buttons. From left to right you just hear “Button, button, button, button, button, button, button, button and button.”
• Connectivity controls read twice, e.g. “Airplane mode, off, switch button off. Wifi, on, switch button on,” and so on.
• The torch brightness slider and timer slider both read “text size,” and it is possible that other sliders behave the same way in the control centre. This should not be, instead reading “torch brightness” as it should.

Tap backs
• These are completely inaccessible in the messages app. Selecting “react” from the actions menu shows nothing, just a blank item. There is nowhere to scroll, just the one item, and double tapping it will react with a laughing emoji. We should be able to scroll through the options just like in previous versions, but with the added options as necessary. This also goes for MacOS Sequoia, where the tap back dialog now shows as an empty group with nothing inside, but this is iOS feedback, so perhaps I’ll get to writing about Sequoia another time.

Live recognition
Detection mode, previously in the magnifier app, has now been renamed to Live Recognition, a feature of VoiceOver. However, it doesn’t work.
• The live recognition rotor item is the easiest way to configure what you want. Sometimes, during loading animations, a dialog comes up with the options, but this is very hard to find most of the time. Using the rotor item is fine, but this should be enabled by default.
• Text recognition does not work the way it used to. VoiceOver no longer advises you on camera angle if it can’t detect text, and it just cuts out on itself as it reads, often resulting in me only hearing the first syllable of the text before the speech cuts off. A VoiceOver restart does not help this. Thus, live recognition will be unusable for text reading until this is fixed.
• People detection only says that somebody is there, there is no description of the person. However, this may not be a bug.

Other issues
• Lock screen customisation, though okay, still doesn’t work too well with regards to customising the two buttons at the bottom of the lock screen. You must use touch screen to find them, and both will have the same label, so you you’d better remember what order they’re in. You must remove the action with the actions menu, and then press add quick action, and then deal with the same, almost completely inaccessible, controls dialog.
• The bug existing since WWDC 2023 and iOS 17 beta 1, in which VoiceOver lags severely while switching languages, is very much still a problem, particularly on WatchOS, but once again, I digress.
Not much else to say so far, but the speech engine seems to crash more than ever before. I am having to restart VoiceOver at least once every hour, or once every half an hour or so if I’m using the phone all the time. I really hope that a better job can be done fixing these issues before the final release, although my hopes are not high. Bugs that have existed since last June, like the Daniel voice only reading two of a repeated character if four or more have been typed, remain unfixed!!!!

Notes
1. Beta 2 fixed quite a few issues. The tapbacks now work just about like they should, and VoiceOVer does not crash anywhere near as often as it did in beta 1. To those who said braille screen input could do it, you would be correct. I had crashed VoiceOVer about once every twenty seconds at one point. But this is no more.
2. As of beta 3, adding controls to the control centre, and editing, is nicer than it was before. However, the "cancel drag" action is the only thing you will find if using VoiceOver's drag and drop feature. Also, certain things such as torch brightness or timer length no longer show for us, and neither does the Services In Use button, which is the new way to switch to voice isolation or wide spectrum microphone modes. You must disable VoiceOver and tap above the battery status menu to get there, but good luck, you might end up tapping the wrong thing and exiting control centre instead.
3. Live Recognition now works quite nicely actually. However, you still don't get instructions about where to hold the camera if text can't be seen. It does seem to read well enough now though.
4. One thing that piece of feedback didn't mention that I have written about separately is the photos app. The home screen works quite well, but as soon as you go into a list, let's say for a particular date, you just have one item that takes up the whole touch screen. You can swipe to photos but this is not efficient. Apple should be aware of this, but as of right now it isn't fixed.

If anyone else has any findings of bugs that I have mentioned that are just a Me problem, or that have good work-arounds, do let me know. I believe that you can customise the colour of icons just fine, and dragging and dropping manually works okay as long as you map out where you're going to move the item.

hi can personal ghoice work outside the US in ios 18? i am from the Uk, not the US Thanks, Will

Did you use your main device for testing? if yes, good luck. and btw, report report report!

Anyone see significant changes in the public beta? I expected the developer beta was primarily for API fixes, and the first public beta would address some of the UI issues we've identified, but so far, it seems more or less the same. Example: The issue with naming activities is still present.

I am installing it in my iPad 9. No that most features will not work with it but want to play with and check CRS or whatever is call. Wish me luck installing it.

In the latest beta, I noticed that app dragging is now almost perfect. At least now you can move correctly, although sometimes it says that the app is moved before another, while it puts it after, etc. But better than before!
The voice equalizer still doesn't work (in the sense that by activating it the voice is heard very badly), and for me neither does the real-time recognition.

How do you activate it on the i iPad? Using iPad 9 and public beta 1.

I've noticed a couple issues since loading the public beta onto my iPhone 15 (the one with the A chip - I don't have the Pro).

One is a fairly serious focus issue in the App Switcher. Just as I go to 3-finger swipe up to close an app, I hear VoiceOver announce the name of some other app I swiped past two swipes earlier, and the result is I close the wrong app. I've seen a similar issue where it doesn't even bother announcing the name, it just closes the wrong app. Other times it works fine. I don't have this issue on my iPad Pro.

The other issue is that Seeing AI won't load, not even after a full restart. I just checked the App Store, and so far, no updates.

Other than that, I'm pleased with the beta on the iPhone 15.