On occasions, some VoiceOver voices will announce punctuation such as apostrophes and quotation marks when they should not be spoken

Category
VoiceOver Announcements/Feedback
Severity
Minor

Description

There are situations system-wide where you will find that some VoiceOver voices will announce punctuation such as apostrophes and quotation marks when they should not be spoken.

Steps to reproduce

This behaviour has been encountered in numerous situations, but steps to reproduce it are likely to vary depending upon the selected region and language.

Essentially, navigate text blocks and UI elements which include quotation marks. If they are consistently not spoken by VoiceOver, then it is likely that your combination of VoiceOver voice and region is not affected.

Bug First Encountered

iOS/iPadOS 14.0

Device(s) bug has been encountered on

iPhone

How often the bug occurs

Sometimes

Workaround

One workaround is to switch to a voice that does not exhibit this behaviour. A slightly more involved workaround is to add a second voice to VoiceOver's language rotor; set the voice in that secondary language to your preferred voice; then use the rotor to switch to your preferred voice in the secondary language. Note that it may take some trial and error to find a voice that will behave as expected for your specific region and language needs.

Apple feedback #

FB8024146

Status

Fixed

Fixed In

iOS/iPadOS 14.1

Options

Comments

By Haroon Probst on Monday, October 5, 2020 - 11:31

That is correct! I experienced this very bug right the way throughout the beta cycle.
As you say… The only way that I could find a workaround for this annoyance… was to add English/u.s to the roter… and selecting this active… whilst keeping my region set to English Australia.
I had no desire personally to put up with a different voice… as in my opinion… and my personal choice. Alex is the king of my voiceover universe.
With the language and region both set to English Australia… And using Alex as my chosen speech engine.
I was hearing opening double quotations and closing double quotations… in text messages and other places where they seemingly did not even exist.
Oh and lets not forget that frequent unpronounceable being spoken frequently on the web too.
Have also reported this ad nauseam in feedback reports… all through the entire ios14 developer beta program.
Including visual and audio demonstrations of this condition.
These were also sent to apple accessibility.
A lot of care and diligence on my part… to report with extreme accuracy and detail. Seemingly to have been unheard by by apparently open ears.
Just saying!