iOS 27 and iPadOS 27: A Summary of VoiceOver and Braille Issues and Improvements

Trouble is these devices have become more and more featured and I just don't think the accessibility has been able to scale at the same speed. there are more products, more services, and in the end it just all becomes pretty bloated and unmanageable. I'm pretty sure Apple's secrecy between departments, if that is stil a thing, can't help when trying to build in accessibility.

I think this is the first year where I haven't updated iOS on day one.

I'm not counting the times where I couldn't update simply because my device was too old. I went from a 6s to an iPhone 12, and I probably could update, but right now I'm choosing not to.

I could get a new phone, but my phone does what I need it to do, at least for now. And I'm honestly not impressed with all the bells and whistles that Apple has come up with this year. Even if I had a brand new iPhone, I don't think I would update simply because of all the bugs that are around this year.

There is one update that you can still get if you don't want to update to iOS 27. iOS 26.7, I think, is the version number. I could be wrong, but it's a small security patch. So you can still update to 26.7 and you shouldn't get any of the underlying bugs that iOS 27 has. I updated to 26.7 on my iPhone 12 and it works. No iOS 27 bugs. So I guess that's an added bonus.

Singer girl. I'm curious. What are you using to dictate? Because sometimes your messages don't make sense. I'm also using dictation to write this message, but I'm using ChatGPT. When I hit enter, ChatGPT transcribes what I say, and I just copy the text. I don't hit send or anything. I just hit dictate, speak my message, occasionally pausing to formulate my thoughts before continuing.

I normally get ChatGPT to proofread my posts. But as a proof of concept, I think I will leave this one alone, so you can get an idea of the capabilities that ChatGPT can do.

There is an app called Whispr flo, I probably spelt it wrong, that does a similar thing to what I'm doing, only that works in any edit field.

How good it is, I'm not sure, because I already pay for ChatGPT, so I figured why not just use that? It's basically the same thing. Anyway, I've gone off topic, so I will simply leave my rambling post here. That's the problem with dictating messages, isn't it? When you dictate a message, you tend to ramble on more than when you type out a message.

I will sign off by saying this. Those who have already updated, good luck. But I'm not going to be one of you, at least for the foreseeable future.

Hopefully Apple come to their senses and restores the original VoiceOver profile.

I think Apple did a pretty good job. Could they do better? Sure what company can't. The key is be nice and constructive.

When updating apps it no longer automatically lets you know when an update is complete. So for example if you have 3 apps to update and you do them one at a time sitting on the element where it says update 3 once the first is done it used to say update 2 automatically. Now, you need to keep flicking off and on until it shows the next number in the list. This maybe similar to the bug someone else pointed out where deleting emails no longer automatically takes you onto the next mail and reads the heading.

I updaded my Iphone 16 Plus last night. The new voice profile is not so bad, the only problem is sometimes it sounds lower compaired to other sounds.

New image description feature is great, however it has some quirkes.

First, when describing photos about people, the description doesn't give you anything about facial expression, age and gender. I think this creats unnecesary in accuracy about visuals including people, especially when you are describing something you don't know anything about.

The second and frustrating problem is, there is a random censourship about sensitive content. I'm sorry, are you kidding me apple? I was just scrolling stories on Instagram and then it said something about sensitive content. I neded to use Be My AI to understand the story. No sensitive content.

I hope they will change these two behaviors, or using Be MY AI or Gemini will be more efficient for long term. However, I would like to keep using the built in feature as it's faster and easyer to use then taking a screenshot and sending to a third party app.

Fortunately, my overall IOS 27 experience is smoother, I haven't encountered any showstopper bugs so far.

Hi, I want to answer the question with somebody asked what I use for dictation. I’m just using the regular iPhone Apple dictation. I can’t afford ChatGPT or any other AI subscription. I’m using everything that just natively built into the iPhone. I hope this makes a little bit more sense. I think sometimes my messages may not make sense because I forget to put in punctuation. This time I’m actually making more of an effort, so I hope it works. :-) That’s a great question. I don’t mind you asking.

I don’t have a computer in my house. I can’t copy things because I can’t physically use a router. So everything is just purely dictation. Even if I do try to edit things a little bit with the delete button of a keyboard that’s about as far as I can do with any kind of editing. Even just swiping the phone screen is physically painful for me. I wish it weren’t but it is what it is. If there weren’t physical issues, trust me, I would be doing that. And before anybody says anything about me getting a Bluetooth keyboard I can’t really do that either. Janella device for me to have to carry around and keep charged and things like that. :-) So yeah here we are. I’m doing the best I can with what I have to work with.

This is the last time I’m answering this question on this website. :-) And whoever reads it, please understand that. This is the very reason I was on this website a couple years ago and left and came back. I have to use dictation. I have CP so it makes it physically harder for me to use my phone. I have to use voiceover and I have turned on voice control before too. They actually work pretty well together. The only thing you do have to do with it is you do have to put voice control to sleep so that it doesn’t put extra text into your field. That’s all I’m going to say about this. I need to get this back on top of the original post here. I hope that you guys are going to enjoy iOS 27 this early on the cycle and I will be waiting for 27.1 release. Also, I am probably going to just go ahead and update to 26.7 because a lot of the bugs and 27 are something I really want to deal with yet. Thanks for reading.

I have some weird sound issues after multiple reboots on ios 27. VO seems to have similar EQ settings to when it's in phone call mode, and notification sounds are sometimes louder too. Fortunately it's only with iphone speakers airpods work fine, and all media and etc are fine too even on iphone. Does anybody experience this?

Hi all,

I have found a quicker way to send audio messages. so, as you've probably notice, apple has added a new option in the messages settings called show in text field which will let you select what will be shown after the text field. the default has always been start dictation, but for those that love to send audio messages like myself, I have selected Record Audio as my default. Once record audio is selected, from within any message conversation, dubble tap and hold on the record audio button, and slide up to lock the button. then, when you are finished speaking or whatever, dubble tap on the stop button to finish the recording. the nice thing is you finally get haptic feedback during recording when speech is disabled, whereas in previous versions of iOS you didn't. You still have the old school way, which is navigating to the Apps button and then finding the audio button, but I find that to be a bit tedious for me, so going The new method is the way to go and it's much faster, in my opinion. so for those that haven't tryed it, give it ago sometime.

I have to say, most of the notification bugs have been around for me since iOS 26 came out. At least for the last three or four versions. I was supremely annoyed with this particular bug on my phone, so I updated, and haven't experienced anything since. I have experienced the bugs with the combo boxes. That's a new one.

With each of the betas, I have had a strange problem when pressing the side button to wake up my phone.

Right after each update, for a day or two, if I press the side button, I feel a haptic feedback, but there is no speech. The only way I can get speech started is to press and hold the side button to activate Siri. Then, after I release the button, Voiceover starts speaking again and I'm at the locked home screen. Then I can finally unlock my phone.

Although it is easy to get around this issue, it is frustrating and takes more time to unlock the phone. that can't be done quickly.

I've tried rebooting the phone several times, and sometimes that fixes the problem. the problem is mysteriously resolved after a day or two.

I wonder if this has something to do with the phone re-indexing itself. As I said, this has happend with each iOS 27 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro and has resolved each time, but only after a day or so.

Has anyone else run into this curious bug?

--Pete

I reported the audio profile bug to Apple last week. They say there are more than 10 similar reports and that the resolution is open in the feedback app, so nothing yet. I'll say something if that changes.

Thanks for the great summary and all your hard work compiling this info!

It’s not as bad as it seems—there’s a noticeable reduction in the lower frequencies, yet the voice still sounds good and remains clear.
What puzzles me is that my default Siri voice no longer runs at my preferred speed. At 100%, it now feels closer to 60%, and unlike Android’s TalkBack, I can’t push the slider beyond 100%.
I had to change the Siri voice’s tone to regain speed, but in doing so I lost the emotional richness it once carried. Interestingly, other Siri voices in my rotor weren’t set to 100% to begin with, yet they maintain their rates and can accelerate significantly when the slider is raised.
On the brighter side, the image descriptions feature alone makes the upgrade worthwhile. It’s far faster than Be My Eyes or Seeing AI, and iOS even automatically suggested assigning it to the action button—which I did. What’s remarkable is that, unlike other shortcuts, a long-press doesn’t visibly open the camera interface. Instead, the picture is captured almost instantly, and the description arrives within four to five seconds. Your phone does have to be unlocked for this, can be on lock-screen, but unlocked.
Apple places notable restrictions on image descriptions. Often, gender isn’t identified, which can affect the social media experience. For instance, if I’m viewing someone’s WhatsApp status and it simply says “a person wearing a blue jacket, with blah blah other details” I can’t tell whether they posted a photo of themselves or someone else—gender could have been an important clue.
On dating apps, descriptions are generally more detailed, and since they usually align with the gender you’re seeking, it’s less of an issue. What does surprise me, though, is how many people choose revealing outfits on these platforms. Personally, I prefer someone dressed appropriately, so those in short attire tend to get a swift swipe left. That's a personal choise, dressing rights activitists, kindly move on, leave me alone.
Any ways, still on old Siri, have joined the wait-list, not sure if it will be available in my region.

So the problem that people are having with the serious voices, not being the right speaking right is that itself, or is that when you’re using Siri voices with voiceover? Cause they obviously behave differently in different context. Thanks. I mean I’ve never really messed with the speaking rate of the voice in Siri so just curious about that.

Maybe iOS 13 was similar, but for me, this is my personal worst update I have seen so far. Speech crackles all the time and sounds like a cheap phone, VoiceOver spontaneously hangs (a restart fixes it for a few hours until the issue comes back), playing sound for capital letters on the virtual keyboard no longer works, it’s only played out when using the character rotor, Image descriptions turn themselves back on even if I have turned them off (choose the setting never, it turns back to fallback automatically at random times), braille cursor randomly disappears on Braille displays in text fields and all the other odd issues that have been discussed here already. It’s a mess and feels rather like an early beta instead of something that can be called “major update”.
The problem, however, is not that Apple does neglect accessibility, that’s definitely not the case! The reason is that the software release is planned before the developers can say whether the product is ready to ship.
Reddit, for example, is full of bugs for sighted users as well, so no, sighted users don’t have a smooth experience either.
The problem is that every software company does this. Agile development with deadlines after deadlines from mgmt that has no clue what developing software really is like, the developers have no word to say, mgmt decides. With AI / agentic coding, it’s even worse.
Blaming Apple’s Accessibility team is therefore not the way to go in my opinion. They do incredible work every day with so much dedication that is unlike any other big company that’s not mainly focused around assitive technology.

The speech has less break between ui label and state / element type but on youtube for example I get the sound and haptics first and there is some delay before VO tells whatever the element under my finger is.

I think this girl is along the same lines of what was previously commented. I think because companies are releasing a software every year by default. It has to come out at that time of year regardless of whether it’s completely ready or not. So every September there’s always going to be a new iOS release regardless of its quality. So excited people are probably getting some bugs too. I know it’s different for us because we use our devices in different way than everybody else and we’re a little bit more dependent on them for different kinds of tasks, but I’m pretty sure that’s the problem we’re running into. I think it’s true that it doesn’t have anything to do with the Accessibility team. It’s further up people who are actually designing the software. Because there’s been plenty of times that things have been going on with my devices where they’ve had to escalate things to engineers so it’s gonna be something in that department and it’s not even though they necessarily want to do it that way. They’re under pressure to meet a certain deadline. Things are being put out without really having enough time for them to fix the software that’s coming out. Makes a lot of sense. But yeah, I’m definitely gonna be waiting. I feel like there’s definitely more fun this year than this time last year. Although I’d have to say, I waited a really long time for iOS 26 two because there was that bug with voiceover and double tapping or something so I definitely waited for a while for that too. As soon as I get back on Wi-Fi, I am going to update to 26.7 on both of my devices. I mean, we’ll probably be getting security updates for a while so I will wait as long as I need to as much as I’m looking forward to having Gordon, Catherine, Mark, Arthur. I will be downloading all of them in both variance because why not. SE has all of the English speaking. Voices downloaded might as well continue. I’m excited because I was to come. So we just have to hopefully get a better update with the point one release.

What voices are you talking about, SG?

It’s the older ones that used to be in Siri. It’s but they have names now. We’re getting Aaron for US English, Catherine and Gordon for Australian English, and Martha and Arthur for British English the UK English I guess. It’s like the same Voice is like where Nikki is now but they’re making those older voices available for voiceover. And those are the names of the voices. I’m glad those are finally available. I was kind of wondering where they were all these years. Since we’ve had Nikki for a really long time.

When moving apps between folders or adding apps to folders on the homescreen VO either places the app you are attempting to add to a prefered folder in the wrong folder or on another page entirely. I tried adding trivia crack to my previously customizable entertainment folder and it jkept being placed next to my A lady widget. I then tried moving messages to lifestyle folder and it moved the messages app to the folder designated for my job. Just wanted to put this possible bug out there.

Look, as far as I’m concerned, that whole way of editing the home screen needs a complete overhaul with voiceover. So difficult. Double tapping something and holding it and then trying to move it around and hope it lands somewhere you need to. It’s such a messed up design. I have never gotten anywhere with that. I’ve never needed to update. Edit my home screen. I’ve literally just had to have somebody signed into it cause I just cannot do it. Look that may have something to do with my hands like my physical issues, but I honestly don’t think so because I can do regular double tapping and stuff like that. It’s like double tapping in something and holding, and then trying to move it. It’s crazy. Good luck with that. Hopefully you can get it fixed.

First of all, I know the hot button topic for most folks out here seems to be the change in audio. I've suspected all along that I wouldn't even notice any difference, and my prediction was correct. Maybe it's just the voice I use or the nature of my hearing loss, but at least to my ears, everything sounds more or less exactly how it did under ios 26.

I signed up for Siri AI, but am still on the wait list. Hopefully, I'll be able to access those features sooner rather than later.

I've found a way to clear notifications. I used to be able to flick up and clear all notifications. Now, double tapping twice seems to accomplish the same thing. I wouldn't call it a 1 finger quadroople tap; to me, it's 2 distinct double taps, but it works just fine; kind-a reminds me of iOS 7, I think it was.

On Discord in particular, VO is saying things like "Unpronounceable Korean Character" quite frequently. I wish this excessive verbosity could be eliminated, but it's not a show stoper by any means.

I realize that I should probably make this one its own post, but for now, I'll list it here. The only major issue I've encountered so far is that Word Voyance doesn't work anymore. If I double tap a place on the board to start making a word, nothing happens. The developer is aware of the issue, but says he can't reproduce it, which is beyond baffling.

That's pretty much all I've discovered since installing iOS 27 last night.

Hi, I've noticed since updating that double tapping on the battery level in the status bar no longer jumps you to the top of long pages on websites such as apple Vis anymore.

A few observations and bugs/behaviours I’ve found in iOS 27:

• VoiceOver no longer says things like “ellipsis” when typing three full stops. Instead, it says “3 full stop”. It also doesn’t properly announce ASCII characters such as :-) when typing them, and instead says things like “close bracket”, at least for me. The characters are still displayed correctly; VoiceOver just doesn’t announce them properly while typing.

• When copying speech, VoiceOver really does copy the speech now. This is annoying because it also copies things VoiceOver has added, such as “Actions available”, “link” or “heading” at the end of an item, rather than just the actual text.

• VoiceOver also seems to say “paren” rather than “bracket” in some places now, although this seems quite inconsistent.

I’d appreciate it if others who are experiencing these issues could file feedback as well.

Other than that, I don’t seem to have run into any major annoyances with iOS 27, at least so far. Actions available

Am I the only one who actually prefers the current audio profile of the speech synthesizers? Yes it has less bass and sounds roughly the same as my Apple Watch Ultra 3, but at least it doesn't vary wildly at louder volume levels like it used to on iOS 26.

The problem is that the iPhone's speakers are unable to keep the same bassy audio profile at max volume, so previously Apple was dynamically adjusting the equalizer as VoiceOver spoke at louder sound levels, which just sounded weird. By changing the audio profile of the voices, they ensure that one can increase the volume without the dynamic equalizer kicking in or the audio distorting.

Personally I could care less whether the voices sound less bassy. As long as I can understand them, it's all fine, and the new audio profile makes that easier in places with loud ambient noise.

Alright, so I mostly use my iPhone as a paperweight and desk gem, but I still managed to find two issues while I used it a bit to update to iOS 27:

1. It seems impossible to re-order VoiceOver rotor items by tapping-and-holding the re-ordering handles in the rotor items settings. This may also apply to other re-orderable lists, I don't know; see the desk gem remark above.
2. When you use a secondary voice in another language, VoiceOver will read numbers in the default voice. This happens e.g. with the clock on the lockscreen, but also when typing numbers using braille screen input. For some reaosn, numbers get special handling to use the primary voice and/or the primary language of the device.
3. Bonus issue: I believe that some default pronunciation dictionaries for Vocalizer voices have degraded. Maybe they used AI to refine the pronunciation. So that would make it actually better, cuz AI, even if it sounds DIFFERENT.

That said, I think that iOS 27 is a brutal piece of engineering.

I just saw an article on Mac Rumors that Apple has already released a dev beta of 27.2. Their theory is that 27.1 is mostly about support for the Duo so Apple wants to keep that under wraps. Makes sense to me. Maybe 27.2 will finally address this unusually high number of new bugs, in a major release that was supposed to be about fixing long-standing issues. IIRC, the nasty bug in 13 that made VO totally lock up after ending a call and you had to reset to get it back, didn't get fixed until 13.2.

The high number of new bugs makes me wonder: can anyone point to a specific example of the Apple VIS report card actually making a meaningful change? Do we know if anyone at Apple actually sees it?

So you're telling me that most these bugs may or may not be fixed in 27.1 but instead they wanna focus on the IPhone duo rather than all these bugs that should have not been in main release in the first place? Perfect. I know where we all stand in all this. Trust me, I get where you're going with this but ehh,

Using current iOS 27, fermware for Airpod pro 2. VO does not read notifications, get the sound when I get one but VO is not reading. Also 16 pro max.

firstly, thank you AppleVis for always bringing the goods with these bug and feature lists. It's quite helpful and saves me heaps of time. I just point people here if they ask me if updating is worth it or not.

I have to say this trend of releasing the dot O version of a product this packed with bugs (and those are only the accessibility bugs) is a really depressing notion. But alas, as other posters have said it's about the schedules and cash flow. Which even if that is the case, still doesn't make sense to non-greedy, smart people. Who wants to invest in digital garbage? I certainly don't. I no longer have a secondary device to test on, so I'm just not gonna update. It took me three years to update from iOS 17, and I have no problem riding this phone's battery until it is no longer feesable to do so. I'm done giving them money for a while.

If iOS 26 is working, just stay there. Apple has stats that measure how many units get updated and when, so if more people stic' to the old stuff maybe some people there will start caring.

Oh man. Yeah, that language switching bug is an oldy too. If detect langs is off, it should always speak with the current voice, or stay silent in the case of Eloq tryna read Cyrillic or Chinese characters. How this one isn't fixed yet boggles the mind.

Be well all. And stop making excuses for big tech. :)

I was officially given access to new Siri this morning, so thought it might be a good idea to restart my phone. When I did, something seriously weird was happening. When I pressed the side button to unlock my phone, it would just say "screen locked" and never give me a chance to use face ID or enter my passcode. The only work-around I could think of at the time was raise to wake. As of about half an hour ago, the issue seems to have resolved itself, so I turned off raise to wake. However, I decided to enable the option to tap the screen to wake my phone from accessibility, just in case the issue with the side button shows up again.

So now, the most significant issues I have on the phone primarily relate to excessive verbosity, and of course, Word Voyance is still broken. I've discovered that for some unknown reson, VO now perceives the game screen from Word Voyance as an edit field or something. I've shared my findings with the developer, so really hope it can be fixed. If anyone has ideas on something I could try to fix it in the meantime, I'd really appreciate that info.

Incidentally, I haven't done anything with Siri yet; can't think of anything to test it with at the moment.