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   James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 15:34:52 JST James Scholes

   I feel like in iOS 18, certain VoiceOver pauses are longer, like the one between the name of a control and its role. As an example, find the "VPN" option in Settings. The pause between "VPN" and "not connected" is huge. The pause between "not connected" and "button", less so, but still longer than it was before (I think).

   Here's hoping that one day, Apple will make this a configurable option. Naturally, for at least one version of iOS after they do, the increased customisation will mean control names aren't spoken or something equally broken. But then it will be great.

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     James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 15:34:45 JST James Scholes

     in reply to

     Live Recognition claims that there's a group of people in my living room, standing in the snow.

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     James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 15:34:46 JST James Scholes

     in reply to

     According to Messages settings, my iMessage is disabled, and I'm not signed in. But I just received an iMessage from the Apple Store, and sent one to someone. Doesn't matter that much to me, given that I used the Messages app about once a year, but I'm not sure what's going on.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 15:34:47 JST James Scholes

     in reply to

     Aside: apparently the setting to not change the active rotor on focus is not new in iOS 18. Which makes it even more disappointing that it can't be set on a per-activity basis, and only proves the point about the activities feature being badly designed.

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     James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 15:34:48 JST James Scholes

     in reply to

     As an example, activities include an "audio ducking option", the options for which in iOS 18 are: "Default", "On", or "Off". In other words, the new ducking modes exposed by the rotor haven't made it into the activities system, because it's isolated and fragmented from the rest of the screen reader.

     It requires Apple to explicitly opt aspects of behaviour into activity readiness, and make a new UI for their configuration even though one already exists elsewhere. The result, unsurprisingly for something that relies on humans to put in extra work, is activities feeling like an outdated island, or a feature that's still very immature.

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     James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 15:34:49 JST James Scholes

     in reply to

     I think per-activity configuration is a hard problem to solve, mainly from a user experience/workflow perspective. There are still certain parts of NVDA config profiles that constantly trip people up, for example, and many of them without obvious solutions.

     Having said that, Apple's decision to explicitly define a subset of settings that can go in an activity seems like the wrong way to do it. It only leads to fragmentation, and the feature being far less amenable to creativity than it otherwise could be.

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     James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 15:34:50 JST James Scholes

     in reply to

     A setting I believe is new in iOS 18 that I haven't seen mentioned: VoiceOver -> Rotor -> Change Rotor with Item, the description for which reads:

     "Changes the selected rotor based on the VoiceOver-focused item."

     This sounds like a great thing to turn off in certain activities, e.g. the rotor switching to "Actions" each time you swipe in Mail or Dystopia can be frustrating. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be one of the settings that's editable on a per-activity basis, limiting its usefulness. I'm not sure I want to turn it off system-wide.

     (Edit: this apparently isn't new in iOS 18, just new to me.)

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     James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 15:34:51 JST James Scholes

     in reply to

     When turning the rotor to "audio ducking", VoiceOver speaks what sounds like an enum value ("audioducking.mode.off"). I like my screen reader bugs strongly typed and constrained to a set of acceptable values.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) (greenskyoverme@ohai.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 15:35:44 JST GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)

     in reply to

     @jscholes What‘s really there?