An Overview of the New VoiceOver and Braille Features in iOS 27

In this episode, Michael Hansen gives us an overview of the new VoiceOver and braille features in iOS 27.

Topics covered include:

• Image Descriptions
• New Options for Text Exploration and Navigation
• New Verbosity Options for VoiceOver Hints.
• Import and Export Pronunciation Dictionaries
• Enhancements to Live Recognition
• New Cursor Visibility Options
• Braille Improvements
• Legacy Siri Voices Come to VoiceOver

Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using Google Gemini, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool. It was lightly edited and formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Michael Hansen: Hello Friends, it's Michael Hansen here with an overview of the new VoiceOver features and changes in iOS 27. Now, in my personal estimation, iOS 27 is a pretty big update for VoiceOver users. For people with Apple Intelligence capable devices, VoiceOver now has image descriptions and live recognition scene descriptions, the ability to ask questions about your environment, and all kinds of things related to that, powered by Apple Intelligence. It's really cool. And for all users, Apple has also made refinements to text navigation, braille screen input, and a few other things as well. In this podcast, I'm going to talk you through the main highlights of iOS 27 with VoiceOver. Also do a couple of demos along the way, too.

Image Description. At long, long last, Apple has finally brought image description natively to VoiceOver in iOS 27. Now, this is a feature that does require an Apple Intelligence capable device. And how it works is that when you place VoiceOver focus on a picture, for example a photo in the Photos app or an attachment that someone sends you, a picture in Messages or a post on Facebook, you turn the VoiceOver rotor to the image recognition rotor if it's not already there. And then you can swipe through the options depending on what you're wanting to do. Available options include being able to get an intelligent image description, which is kind of your basic everyday one stop shop description. You can ask a single question about the image using the ask about image option. You can explore the image and kind of get a, kind of a separate screen that has the text of the image description and a chat box where you can type or dictate and have a follow-up conversation about the picture. You can recognize your screen, and this will describe everything that is seen on your screen. You can ask about the screen, you can get, you can explore the screen. And if you're in the Photos app, you can also save the intelligent image descriptions for when you go through your photos in the future. You can get started with VoiceOver's image description functionality right out-of-the-box by turning the VoiceOver rotor to image recognition. You can customize which options appear in the VoiceOver image recognition rotor by navigating to Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, Rotor, Image Recognition Rotor. You can also assign any of the image recognition functions to either a touch gesture or a keyboard command by navigating to Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, Commands. Now there are a lot of really cool things that you can do with image and screen descriptions. I'm going to show you just one example of how these descriptions work in practice and the level of detail that you get. And for that, I introduce you to Laszlo the Vizsla. Laszlo was our family's dog. We got him when I was a freshman in high school, and Laszlo was a lifetime dog. So here's a picture of Laszlo taken back in the summer of 2013.
VoiceOver: A tan, short-haired dog standing on a dark hardwood floor, holding a gray, white, and orange athletic shoe horizontally in its mouth. The dog faces forward with its ears slightly back, standing near the edge of a gray carpet. A wooden cabinet with a television and a small electronic device on top sits in the background to the right, and a wooden door is visible on the left.
Michael Hansen: And for comparison, here is that same picture described with Be My AI.
VoiceOver: Be My AI: light brown dog standing indoors on a hardwood floor, holding a gray and orange athletic shoe in its mouth. The dog has short fur, floppy ears, and a slim build, and is facing slightly toward the camera. Part of the room has carpet next to the wood floor. In the background are wooden cabinets and a wooden TV stand with some electronics and small items on top.

Michael Hansen: New Options for Text Exploration and Navigation. In iOS 27, VoiceOver users now have some new options for text exploration and navigation. When swiping through the screen or exploring by touch, you can now have VoiceOver navigate by paragraph, by line, by sentence, or the previous default behavior, navigate by element. As mentioned previously, the default behavior is for VoiceOver to navigate and speak the entire element, which is usually okay in most situations. It usually works out to be generally navigating by paragraph or an appropriate length of text. Sometimes, though, you want to navigate by line or maybe even navigate by sentence to kind of move through a text slower or more deliberately or for any other reason. You can now do that both when you are exploring the screen by touch, that is kind of moving your finger around the screen and just hearing and, you know, hearing what is under your finger, or when you're navigating using the left and right one-finger swipe gestures to kind of move through the interface by swiping left to right. You can access these options in Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, and then scroll down to the text heading and you'll see options for Text Exploration and Text Navigation. One note here is that the Text Exploration option, it says that it is by paragraph, but when you look at the explainer it says that VoiceOver will speak the element under your finger.

New Verbosity Options for VoiceOver Hints. It is now possible in iOS 27 to customize the verbosity for VoiceOver hints. If you navigate to Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, Verbosity and Hints, you now have three options. You can select from Always, which will speak VoiceOver hints all the time. You can select None, which will not speak VoiceOver hints at all. Or you can select App-Specific. And this is the new one, and it will only speak VoiceOver hints when they have custom hints enabled by the developer of a particular app. So this could be potentially useful if let's say you don't want or need the general VoiceOver hints like double tap to activate, but you do want to know if an app developer has enabled some custom actions or custom gestures or really anything else that would be helpful to VoiceOver. Another setting you have here is you can control the delay duration between when VoiceOver stops speaking the item and when the hint is spoken. You can find that in the same settings area here under Hints. The default setting is 0.80 seconds, and again that is the time between when VoiceOver stops speaking the item and when the VoiceOver hint speaks like double tap to open. And you can increment or decrement that time depending on your preferences.

Import and Export Pronunciation Dictionaries. The pronunciation dictionary allows you to change how a synthesizer pronounces a specific word. Especially helpful if, for example, the synthesizer does not pronounce your first or last name correctly. The pronunciation dictionary has been around for several years, and in iOS 27, you can now share those pronunciation dictionaries with other people, as well as import pronunciation dictionaries provided by fellow VoiceOver users. Exported dictionaries are saved as CSV, comma-separated value, files and can easily be edited. You can find these options in Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, Speech, Pronunciations. In that area, you'll find options to import and share.

Enhancements to Live Recognition. Live recognition is an accessibility feature that provides visual information to the user from the device's camera viewfinder. In iOS 27, Apple has greatly improved live recognition with the power of artificial intelligence. If you have an Apple Intelligence capable device, you can get AI-powered descriptions of your environment as well as ask specific questions prior to getting a description or after you get your description depending on which option you use. The experience is very, very similar to what you can get with a third-party app, although of course it benefits from the Apple integration directly with VoiceOver so there's obviously going to be a lot more ease of use and refinement with Apple's implementation. Now, what's really cool in my opinion is that you can start live recognition just by pressing your phone's Action button. Of course, you can set it to open the legacy live recognition and use your accessibility detectors, but the really cool thing is that you can use live recognition to either ask a question about your environment prior to getting your description, and that will kind of bring up this interface where you can either type or say your question and have a follow-up conversation with the device once you get your description, you can take new pictures with either of the volume buttons and kind of have this back-and-forth conversation until you get the information that you need. You can also set the Action button to describe scene. And this will basically, whenever you press the Action button, it will scan your scene and describe it to you, again using these AI-powered image descriptions. It's really cool, and I'm going to show you both of these things here starting with the ask a question interface. I've got a tea packet here and I'm going to find out what it can tell me about this tea. So I'm going to press and hold that Action button.
VoiceOver: Ask. Dictate.
Michael Hansen: What type of tea is this?
VoiceOver: Just a moment. This is Yogi Sweet Tangerine Positive Energy tea.
Michael Hansen: In addition to ask a question, you can also configure the Action button to describe scene. And this will give you just a kind of quick generic, but yet detailed description of your surroundings and whatever the camera viewfinder sees. I've got it pointed at my window, so let's see how this goes.
VoiceOver: A large, four-pane window set into a plain, light gray wall, looking out onto a bright, cloudy sky. The window is framed in thick, dark gray or black metal, divided into four equal rectangular panes by a central vertical mullion and a horizontal transom. Through the glass, a bright blue sky is visible, filled with fluffy white clouds. Below the clouds, the tops of green trees and the roofs of distant buildings can be seen. The window sits above a deep, white sill upon which a few small, indistinct objects rest, including what appears to be a white power adapter and a dark cord. To the left of the window, a portion of a tall, slender, brass-colored floor lamp is visible, featuring a shallow, bowl-shaped shade near the top. The lamp stands next to a vertical structural column that juts out slightly from the wall. The ceiling above is flat and painted the same light color as the walls.
Michael Hansen: You can use live recognition with or without VoiceOver, so let's say that you use Magnifier and Zoom, but you have no need for VoiceOver, live recognition is still going to be available for you. Can access all live recognition settings a couple of different ways. You can go to Settings, Accessibility, and then down to Live Recognition. Or you can access them through VoiceOver settings: Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, VoiceOver Recognition, and then Live Recognition.

New Cursor Visibility Options. The VoiceOver cursor is VoiceOver's pointer or VoiceOver's focus. And by default, the VoiceOver cursor is always shown on screen, in screenshots, and in screen recordings. In iOS 27, there are some new options to control when the VoiceOver cursor is shown. The setting is called Cursor Visibility, and you can choose between three distinct options. You can choose Show Cursor, which will show the cursor normally on screen and in screenshots and recordings. You can choose Hide in Screenshots and Recordings, which will show the cursor normally on screen, but hide the cursor in screenshots and recordings. Or you can choose Hide Cursor, which will not show the cursor at all on the screen or in screenshots or recordings. You can find these options by navigating to Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, scrolling down to the cursor heading, and selecting the Cursor Visibility item.

Braille Improvements. Apple has made a couple of noteworthy braille improvements in iOS 27. The first is that for braille displays, text fields now show their accessibility label surrounded by indicators. You can press any routing button on the indicator to collapse or expand display of that label. For braille access, you can now open plain text or PDF files right from within the Files app. Of course, note that with PDF, your mileage may vary and is dependent upon how well the author of the document did in making it accessible. Typing enhancements in braille screen input. You can now type alternative characters in braille screen input by long-pressing on the dots and then releasing, and swiping down with one finger until you hear the alternative character that the dots are supposed to represent. Once you hear the character that you want, you can continue typing and the character will be entered just as you wanted it to be. It is also easier now to use autocorrect and text and emoji prediction features in braille screen input in iOS 27. Now, when you are typing, you can swipe down with one finger to hear the list of predictions or emojis. Once you hear the word or emoji you're looking for, you can swipe to the right with one finger to add it. And if autocorrect autocorrects something incorrectly, you can swipe down with one finger to undo the incorrect autocorrection. Note that for autocorrect, you'll need to have that enabled at the system level by going to Settings, General, and Keyboard, and scrolling down to Auto-Correction. And you can also turn autocorrect in braille screen input on and off specifically by navigating to Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, Braille, Braille Screen Input, Auto-Correction.

Legacy Siri Voices Return to VoiceOver. In 2015, Apple made the Siri voices available for use with VoiceOver in iOS 9. Over time, Apple's Siri voice offerings did change, generally when Apple evolved Siri's voice more broadly, and some legacy voice options did become unavailable. It's worth noting that voices like the Nicky US English voice have remained available consistently since 2015. So it's unclear if what we're seeing here is Apple having withdrawn some voices and bringing them back, or just a long-standing issue that Apple has resolved in this release. The end result, whatever the circumstances, is that VoiceOver users now have several more voices from which to choose. For US English, VoiceOver users now have access to the Aaron voice in both standard and enhanced versions. Australian English, you have access to the Catherine and Gordon voices in standard and enhanced. And in UK English, you now have access to the Martha and Arthur voices, once again in standard and enhanced versions.

Well Friends, that's going to about do it for this podcast. iOS 27 will be available starting Monday, September 14th. Be sure to stay tuned to applevis.com for all the details. We're going to have bug lists, we're going to have some demos of some of the features, we're going to have a blog post from Scott Davert kind of going into more detail about what these features are and how you use them, and maybe a surprise or two along the way as well. Thanks for listening, and I hope wherever today finds you that you have joy, peace, and every good thing.
Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by the community at AppleVis.com. AppleVis: Empowering people who are blind, deafblind, or who have low vision to get the most from Apple products and related technologies. A proud member of the Be My Eyes family. For more information, visit our website at www.AppleVis.com.