VoiceOver became very unstable after latest iOS update

Submitted by Daniel P on Monday, December 16, 2019.
Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hello!

I upgraded my iPhone SE to iOS 13.3 last week. Since I have done that voiceover behaves very unstable on my device. Especcially when I am browsing through web content, both in Safari as well as in other app's web views, Voiceover seems to crash very often and restarts it self automatically (indicated by announcing "Screen Curtain is active" or whatever this is called in english iOS version). :-)

Additionally, the speech output freezes very often, which means that I can still touch an element with Voiceover, which confirms with its usual click, but the TTS doesn't read anything any more. The only way to fix this is restarting VO manually with a tripple home button click.
I found out that the problem can be avoided for a while by killing most active apps from memory, something I didn't have to do for years now.

Is it possible that iPhone SE gets to its mmemory limits with iOS 13.3? Does someone else have similar problems with iOS 13.3 on iPhone SE? The thing that confuses me most about this is that I had no such problems with earlier versions of iOS 13, it all began with last weeks update.

Would be grateful for some other iPhone SE user's experience.

Kind regards from Daniel

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Comments

Submitted by flcomputergeek on Monday, December 16, 2019

These issues were severe for me on my iPhone 7 under IOS 13, to the point that it made the phone unuseable. It was one of the main reasons I upgraded my phone.
I have a new iPhone XR, which worked well until 13.3. I am experiencing similar behavior to what you describe. In addition, I find that the HTML pages refresh frequently and move the cursor back to the top of the page.

Yes, both restarting and killing apps from memory improves the situation, but only for a limited time. However, this is no permanent solution to my problem.

Quite interesting that this also occurs on iPhone XR, which is a much more powerful device. This makes me feel that this is not due to iPhone Se's limited memory but maybe a general Voiceover bug in this version. So I can still hope that Apple might fix this soon.

Thanks for your info!

Submitted by J.P. on Monday, December 16, 2019

This has existed all throughout 13. I’ve reported numerous times in the beta program.
It got worse on 13.3 for me. The triple click doesn’t work for me. I have to lock/unlock.
Reboot and fresh install without backup was unsuccessful in correcting this. I’m using an 11 128GB. I’m using Samantha, but happened with other voices as well.

Submitted by tunmi13 on Monday, December 16, 2019

I am using an iPhone 6s on iOS 13 three. It improved a little after I upgraded to the latest version, but I'm also experiencing this issue.

Submitted by cybe on Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Apple wants you to buy new iPhone, simple as that.

Submitted by Adaria on Wednesday, December 18, 2019

This is happening to a degree on my brand new as of two weeks ago iPhone 11. This update just auto installed yesterday and already noticing as mall hit to voiceover being abit laggy comparatively to before the update.

One thing that happened to mine less than one week after I got it was that all sounds just stopped, vibrations were still going, could answer a could hear it and VO but as soon as the call ended boom, no more sounds. Not sure how I managed to fix it but it was terrifying for a bit.

Haven't seen this yet with 13.3 but hoping these issues get dealt with. I keep screen curtain off in case my phone goes totally silent again as restarting and turning off VO didn't actually help the issue last time.

My concern is that this is happening on a brand new, as of this year, phone. It isn't so horrible and I haven't noticed the issues on web pages yet, but this has only been a day. I'll report back if I notice any other issues as I go along.

Submitted by KE7ZUM on Thursday, December 19, 2019

I'm actually having no stibility issues with voiceover apaprt from voiceover not wanting to click the button(s) I highlight. I did report this a few months ago so we'll see what happens. I'm over all quite happy with iOs 13.