notification center on apple watch

By Alicia Krage, 15 May, 2026

Forum

watchOS and Apple Watch Apps

I'm not sure when this started, because this has been happening for quite a while now, maybe since watch OS 26.4. But when I press the digital crown to wake the watch, a lot of times VoiceOver will say notification center over and over and over again. The only way to get it to stop is to press the digital crown a few times until I get to the list of apps.

Does anyone know why this is and if there is any way to make it stop? It drives me nuts.

Options

Comments

Bug

11 watch and OS 26.5 and no issues. I just did it and no. Long live cats and you.

Experience this too

I experience this as well. I can usually get it to stop by placing my entire palm over the watch and retrying to bring up the watch face a couple of times, but it's super annoying.

Bug Since 26.4

It happens on my AppleWatch 9 as well since installing WatchOS 26.4. Tried reporting it to Apple Accessibility and they told me to do a hard reset, which of course didn't fix it. Seems to me that VoiceOver on WatchOS has a lot of room for improvement, it's getting more sluggish and unresponsive with each software update.

OS 26.5

Did people updated to it? The battery is much improve. Also remember VO is old and apple keep releasing more new features and expecting VO to work. Probably they just add paches. VO need a serious overhold specially with Siri 2.0 coming in OS 27.

You could try turning the crown clock wise

Usually, whenever I turn the crown clockwise, it will return to the watch face. However, I agree that watchOS in terms of VoiceOver performance has significantly decreased. VoiceOver is not that pleasant to use, I must say, as compared to older versions.

Some examples include:
1. The Workout app
2. The Smart Stack
(a) VoiceOver seems to focus on all those unnecessary details inside the Smart Stack now.
(b) Previously, the Smart Stack was a great way for VoiceOver users to have glanceable information.
(c) However, now the Smart Stack is just extremely cluttered for any VoiceOver use.

For example, when I take a look at my sleep data, it presents all the sleep data in the Smart Stack instead of just basic information like what the Smart Stack used to show (which was only the time you spent sleeping).

The same bug

I've completely the same bug since my first day of using Apple Watch Series 10 with WatchOS 11.5. Then I've installed each update including 26.XX, tried resetting watch settings -- nothing works.
The same thing also happens if I sometimes simply open the Notification center, i.e. instead of reading the actual notifications VO starts saying "Notification Center" again and again...