In this podcast, Thomas Domville demonstrates a new iOS feature that lets you reset VoiceOver settings back to factory defaults—useful when settings have become confusing or inconsistent. He walks through where the option lives, how to activate it, and the consequences (you’ll lose all customizations).
Key Points & Takeaways
- Purpose: Quickly restore VoiceOver to a clean, default state when troubleshooting is too time-consuming.
- Where to find it: Inside Settings → Accessibility → VoiceOver.
- Irreversible action: Resetting wipes all VoiceOver customizations (voices, rotor options, verbosity, speech settings, etc.). There’s no “undo.”
- When to use: After lots of experimentation or when helping someone whose device has settings “buried” or misconfigured.
- After the reset: You’ll need to reconfigure your preferred voice and options.
Step-by-Step: Reset VoiceOver Settings (iPhone)
- Open Settings.
- Navigate to Accessibility.
- Select VoiceOver.
(If using VoiceOver: one-finger double-tap to open items, swipe right/left to move focus.)
- Scroll to the bottom of the VoiceOver screen.
(Tip: A four-finger tap near the bottom half of the screen jumps focus near the bottom.)
- Choose Reset VoiceOver Settings.
- Confirm the reset.
You’ll return to factory defaults for VoiceOver.
What Resets?
- Voices & speech (e.g., your selected voice like Samantha)
- Rotor configuration
- Verbosity & audio settings
- Other VoiceOver-specific preferences
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI Note Taker – VoicePen, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.
Thomas: Hello and welcome. My name is Thomas Domville, also known as AnonyMouse. Now, this is kind of a cool new feature that I would like to introduce to you, and that is being able to reset your voiceover settings. Yes. In the previous past iOS, you were not able to specifically reset the voiceover settings. I mean, you probably have known and tried to reset different types of settings. And all they give you is just like all or nothing. It's just like, wow, I don't want to reset all my settings.
I just want to reset the voiceover settings. And this might occur for one reason or another. Now, in my case, I will visit some of my clients from time to time. And I noticed that it's just really, really messed up. Or I should say, sometimes it's just easier to reset the voiceover settings than to try to figure out what they have done and what needs to be changed. So there could be a number of things. And you know as well as I do, everything is buried, right? And there could be multiple things.
I need to go find, turn this off, turn this on, put this back in. And it can get really, really complicated and takes too much time. So I want to take the shortcut approach and just be able to reset the voiceover settings alone. So I'm going to show you how to do this. All you have to do is go right up to your native settings. Let's do one finger double tap on that. Now swipe to the right until you get the accessibility button.
Go ahead and do one finger double tap that to open that up.
VoiceOver: Personalize iPhone in ways that work best for you with accessibility features for vision, mobility, hearing, speech, and cognition. Learn more. Heading.
Thomas: Swipe to the right until you find the voiceover button.
VoiceOver: Personalize vision. Heading. Voiceover. On. Button.
Thomas: One finger double tap. Open this up.
VoiceOver: Voiceover. Switch button. On. Double tap to toggle settings.
Thomas: Now, at the very bottom of this page should give you the option to reset. So I'm going to do a four-finger tap on the bottom half of my iPhone.
VoiceOver: Reset voiceover settings.
Thomas: Voila. Now we're here. Now, if you're ready to do this, and be aware that if you do... Go down this rabbit hole and to reset it, you will not be able to get back what you have lost. So meaning that you will lose everything. So you'll have to start it from scratch.
VoiceOver: Now if you're ready, go ahead and do one finger tap, double tap on that. And voila, you have reset your voiceover settings.
Thomas: Now note, this does reset everything back to factory default, meaning that your voice and everything you have set up is gone. So you'll have to start over from scratch. Don't like the Samantha, no big deal. Just go back to speech, get your regular voice that you like back. But the point is that everything gets reset back to the factory default. So that is a beautiful new feature that is going to come in handy for myself and to get people out of a jam, and that way we can start over from scratch.
So if that's something you have come across and you just want to be able to start over, because sometimes that's just the best thing to do, so now you know how to do that. Well, that's going to do it for me. My name is Thomas Domville, also known as AnonyMouse. Until next time, bye.
Comments
I’m glad this is finally a feature
Thanks as always for an awesome podcast. I’m glad this is finally a future. I think this is something that has been long overdue. But such a pain to have to reset the entire phone to just reset the settings when you only really wanted to maybe just rest or something like that. I hope this will be like narrow down even more at some point because there’s so many aspects of voiceover, but you might even be able to go even further and just like the velocity or like Voice or something like that. I just feel like they made it way too many steps at least and I was 18 to change your voice. But I have to do with the fact that I can’t use a rotor so I’m sure it ain’t help. Also, just as a suggestion, is there a way that for future podcast we can put like a link to the transcript instead of putting in description of the file. There’s some people beside me that can’t get a rotor to get the where the actual style is a lot of swiping. This makes it difficult of a bunch of comments because then you have to go all the way towards Ballers and then swipe through and wait podcast file just takes a long time my only suggestion for the future. Thanks. :-)
iOS 18.6.2
This was on it.
Interesting Holger
Well on my work phone running 18.6.2 it isn't there. Last setting is double tap timeout. It's an iPhone 14. Before updating my iPhone 15 pro I don't recall it being on that one either.
Lee
Recall it on accessibility and voiceover. 16 pro max. Unless I was drinking something good or smoking something bad. PS do not smoke.