How to Share an Image from Safari with VoiceOver?

By mahmood, 6 July, 2025

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to share an image from the Safari browser to another app using VoiceOver.
My issue is that when I find an image and perform a triple-tap (the standard gesture for a long press), VoiceOver activates the Live Text feature instead of opening the context menu for the image. It selects the text within the photo, and the Share Sheet only gives me the option to share the detected text, not the actual image file.
I've noticed that if I temporarily disable VoiceOver, I can sometimes successfully long-press on the image and get the correct menu to share it, but this is unreliable as it's difficult to find the exact location of the image without screen reader feedback.
Is there a reliable way with VoiceOver enabled to interact with an image in Safari to bring up the context menu and share the image itself, rather than activating Live Text? Any guidance or workaround would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

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Comments

By mahmood on Sunday, July 6, 2025 - 19:50

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried the double-tap and hold gesture as you described. I do feel the haptic feedback, but unfortunately, the result is the same. It still activates Live Text and selects the text within the image, rather than bringing up the context menu to share the image itself.
It seems VoiceOver is prioritizing text recognition over the image element itself. Does anyone else have a different method that might work?

By Tara on Sunday, July 6, 2025 - 21:13

Hi,
Go to VoiceOver's settings, and then Voiceover Recognition, and then Live Recognition. Scenes, Point & Speak and text are selected by default. Deselect the one you don't want, in this case 'text', or deselect all of them if you think that might help. Just reenable them again when you know you want to use live recognition. You could maybe set up a VoiceOver activity for Safari, and you could deselect the different live recognition options just for Safari.

By mahmood on Monday, July 7, 2025 - 05:53

Hi Tara,
Thanks for this detailed suggestion. I've tried what you recommended, but unfortunately, it didn't solve the issue for me.
I went into VoiceOver settings > Voiceover Recognition and disabled all recognition features, including text. However, when I went back to Safari, the triple-tap gesture still activated text selection on the image instead of bringing up the share menu for the image itself.
Regarding the VoiceOver activity, I couldn't find the specific toggles for text recognition within the activity settings; the only related option available was for "Image Descriptions."
The only way I was able to get it to work was by going to Settings > General > Language & Region and turning off the main "Live Text" switch. While this does solve the problem, it's not an ideal solution for me as I use the Live Text feature frequently for other tasks. Having to toggle it on and off globally is quite inconvenient, especially when I'm in a hurry.
Is there a more straightforward way to handle this directly within Safari or VoiceOver, without having to disable Live Text system-wide?
Thanks again for your help.

By Maldalain on Monday, July 7, 2025 - 06:30

Did you try modifying the gesture of live recognition? Change it to something else and see.