There are some bugs in VoiceOver that have not been fixed, Chinese voice also has serious problems.

By Alan, 25 November, 2022

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hello everyone.
I'm an iPhone user from China, I'm sorry I don't speak English, so this post was translated with a translator.
We apologize for any offense to this post.
iOS16 VoiceOver has some problems with Chinese voice, and I don't know where the feedback will be handled.
Many problems Chinese users have already reported to the accessibility hotline, and I have also emailed the accessibility email, but these problems have not been solved.
Let me talk about the problems I found.
1. When VoiceOver uses Siri voice, VoiceOver crashes when encountering long sentences, which has been a problem for a long time, since iOS11.
2. The new Chinese sound added by iOS16 does not have high-definition sound, although you can choose the default sound quality and high-definition sound quality in the options, but in fact, the so-called high-definition sound quality is still the default sound quality effect, and the volume of the voice is very small. It's a pity.
3. The new voice character Lilian misses characters, and the last word of the sentence read each time will be missed. However, LIlian is the best of the new sounds, but it cannot be used because of bugs.
4. Shanghainese is not placed under the classification of Chinese.
5. When using Bluetooth speakers, if you play audio or make adjustments to the audio that is playing, the sound of VoiceOver on iPhone suddenly becomes loud, this problem has been there since I started using iOS11 until iOS16 has not been fixed.
6. VoiceOver on iOS16 cannot read the lunar date on the lock screen.
7. When image description and text detection are enabled, browsing photos in an album will crash VoiceOver. In the camera frame and magnifying glass, VoiceOver also crashes.
8. The person in charge of the VoiceOver Chinese defines some pronunciation of Chinese numbers, but their definitions are redundant, but it causes digital reading errors, please remove the pronunciation definition of numbers, because Vocalizer's voice itself reads numbers very well. Currently, 100 yibai, 1000 yiqian and 100.00 decimal points are mispronounced.

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Comments

By Edward Louie

4 months ago

There is this so-called percentage bug with voiceover in both Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, when it says battery power percent 100, it would say battery 100 percent instead in Chinese, which is a bug that’s hard to describe to Apple.
The lunar calendar on the lock screen has now been moved to where the regular date is on the lock screen, it would say the regular day first and the Chinese day next
Regarding the tingting enhance Voice, this is part of vocalizer, 2.0, vocalizer 2.0 provides the enhanced voice that is similar to the default voice, but the pronunciations are much better. And the new vocalizer 2.0 is how we got a lot of different voices in various different languages and dialects. With Cantonese, this is also a thing With the default voice similar to the enhanced voice.
I found that using Siri female with Mandarin Chinese, when I am reading a long article on WeChat, sometimes voiceover will turn off and turn back on. Sometimes it will be silent for a long time.
The Lillian voice is a premium voice, and with most premium voices, there’s always problems finishing sentences, I tested this out reading Facebook feeds and Twitter, and also Weibo and WeChat post and messages, it does not even finish with reading names and elements on screen.
Shanghainese can be configured using the voiceover language rotor, and for some reason Apple does not classifie it as Chinese, I personally only understand Mandarin and Cantonese, so I don’t know how to test out Shanghainese.
The Bluetooth speaker bug has been around for a long time, this typically happens when you set your Bluetooth device type as speaker and when you make adjustments or use your iPhone with voiceover, the sound will typically get loud and quiet repeatedly.
I’ve also experienced the voiceover issues with reading currencies in either English or Chinese, it’s able to read US dollar fine in English, but reading prices in Chinese yuan, Hong Kong dollar, or US dollar when using the Chinese voice, there will be problems, and when using the Chinese voice to read US dollar prices in anything, it reads it incorrectly, this has been around since iOS 11, and also, the numbers definitions was around since iOS 14, in iOS 14, Apple has changed all the character definitions in Chinese, it has been revamped to more detail in both Mandarin and Cantonese, with Mandarin and Cantonese, all the character descriptions are now different, rather before iOS 14, both Mandarin and Cantonese character descriptions were the same.
I have not experienced the image description bug you had mentioned, but I have experienced a screen, recognition bug on iOS, 15 before when using Chinese apps with voiceover language sett to Chinese, this is really prominent in QQ and countless other inaccessible apps.
Hopefully these annoying bugs will be fixed soon.
Another bug that I have encountered is when using English as the default, iPhone language, certain websites, or apps that use English HTML-based code, voiceover will use the English voice to say unpronounceable, this also happens when the Cantonese keyboard is used, and also anything that uses China mainland-based Cantonese HTML code, voiceover will say, unpronounceable, but when websites use traditional Chinese, Hong Kong Cantonese, HTML code, voiceover will use the Cantonese voices as defined as Chinese Hong Kong

By Carter Wu

4 months ago

I'm so excited after reading your posts.In recent years, Chinese users have encountered more and more bugs.I can say thousands of words just for the input method.This is just an iOS bug, but if you extend it to Mac, the number of bugs is mind-boggling.
In fact, many of us have submitted feedback reports to Apple, and even they have found the person in charge of the real feature development, of course I can't talk about the details.However, most of the bugs in the feedback to date have not been resolved.What is the reason for this? I don't know.I don't think it's going to do anything to fix the bug, but at least it's going to give us some relief, right?

By ming

4 months ago

I think it won't be fixed in IOS 16 will be wait for IOS 17.
I don't like the new SIn Ji voice as well.

By Carter Wu

4 months ago

Unfortunately, it hardly works.Most of the time we get a reply telling us they're going to look into the bug and never hear more from us.Apparently these bugs haven't been fixed either.I, for one, have sent them a staggering number of emails over the years, with little to show for it.So I quite understand the feelings of the author of this post.

By Alan

4 months ago

Thank you all very much for your responses.
I will not reply to each floor individually, so I thank you for your responses.
In addition, I would like to say to Edward Louie that in Chinese mainland or other parts of China, some HTML programmers do not pay much attention to the language configuration of the header of the web page, and some Chinese the language defined by the header of the web page is English, which causes browsers and VoiceOver to read some non-standard Chinese web pages in English. So I guess it's not just Apple's problem.
I also want to complain about some of Apple's practices. Every time there is an accessibility bug, it is necessary to wait until a new iOS major version is released, but new systems often have higher hardware requirements, which is very unfriendly to older models, but some accessibility bug fixes are very necessary for us.
I can understand that Apple forces users to replace their phones with new ones through system updates, but for people with disabilities, especially in developing countries, replacing iPhones is quite expensive.
The reply post here often prompts that there is an error, sorry I can't communicate with you in time.