[Updated: Now Resolved] A Warning to Blind, DeafBlind, and Low Vision Users About Potential Loss of VoiceOver Speech in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26

I do not worship on the apple alter. Do like my iPhone 16 pro max, airpod pro 2, watch 9 and iPad 9. Is not a crime to tell the true. Lucky for me I do not have all those issues, just the VO stopping on the middle of reading notifications. Long live cats.

I'm really tired of the constant negative comments. It doesn't help the situation.

With respect, do not read it. Enjoy your day. Long live cats.

I had first reported this bug to Apple on July 25, 2025. (FB18391105)
This is, in my experience, related to the voiceover voice issues that me and others were having all along.
Similar, if not the same issue has persisted in previous years as well.
I find that this has something to do with voiceover voices not being available when the system update for restarts.

guys, there’s no need for this kind of behavior. Negativity isn’t gonna get us anywhere. They are working on it, they will fix it. I get that its frustrating, but we shouldn't be so negative toward the company that has given the blind community so many good things. No I’m not a fan girl, but I’ve used a lot of Apple devices in my time starting with the old Apple 2E when I was a kid. Anyway, I am running an IPhone twelve and I never had that issue. Last night, I forgot to charge it and the battery ran down. When it started back up, VO started with no problem.

Okay so whilst I usually wouldn’t really agree with negativity, I do understand why some people are negative about this issue.

This issue first occurred for me on the first release of iOS 13, both on an iPhone SE first generation and an iPhone 7. To see this being essentially repeated it’s not a great look, at all.

As I said above, Apple is a multi trillion dollar company. Surely it has people on deck to actually test these releases before they get released to the public and tell Apple, stop, we need to fix this, all that, or whatever, because this will impact a certain community, and we don’t want any discontent. So, I understand where the negativity is coming from. But I do understand also that the negativity is somewhat overboard, and constant criticism isn’t going to get anybody anywhere.

I appreciate the desire to help, but I'm looking for advice from people who have directly experienced this. General advice or guesswork isn't effective when facing a showstopper bug like this. It's also not helpful to hear from those who haven't had the issue. When my phone screen went black after the update, the only thing that fixed it was a backup restore. I've learned my lesson and would strongly advise others to hold off on updating. It's frustrating, but I take full responsibility for updating anyway, knowing the risks.

The weird thing is, not everyone who’s updated iOS 26 has experienced this issue. But yet other people have. I don’t really know what’s going on.

I’m guessing that this might have to do with configuration of specific settings. I did not experience this issue on either of my devices my updated nor have I experienced it on any restarts. It’s awful for people that have though. But I agree this constant negativity of how Apple doesn’t care about us is not going to help anything. And by the way, if that were true, you would not have a device to write on to say that Apple doesn’t care about you. Even if you’re not using an Apple product to post your comment, somebody had to care enough to figure out how to make a device that would work for you to be able to write anything at all on any kind of computer or anything like that. And no, it’s not because I think we’re a charity cases or we should be grateful for all this than that. Of course there’s things that need to be constructively criticized when necessary, but if Apple didn’t care about you, they wouldn’t even be at Apple Accessibility team. There wouldn’t be anybody fixing this as promptly as they happen. It will come as soon as it’s ready. I’m sure they will fix whatever other Accessibility issues as soon as they can too. They always have. They’re like one of the very few mainstream companies are actually does wanna listen to us. They had Accessibility from the very beginning of the earliest computers because they wanted everybody to get their technology. The only reason any other companies I’ve ever followed suit was to copy them. Not because they were thinking of that from the very beginning. No I’m not an Apple fan girl. I just know that their products work for me and I’m gonna continue to use them. I have an iPhone 15 with my primary driver and an iPhone SE third generation is my secondary device for an iPad experience that I never got to have unfortunately. This is the closest I will get, but I’m just happy there’s anything at all. Apple could have said oh too bad you know what you’re blind we don’t care if you can’t use a touchscreen. But they never did. They made away for it to work for us.

For the person expressing so much negativity, while it's mildly annoying that notifications get interrupted, we've had far more serious bugs to contend with over the years. Compared to many bugs, that one is very easy to get around.

I think the only reason I had such a negative reaction to getting that VO not working at start-up bug this time around is because most of my updates over the past 12 years have gone so smoothly. I wasn't prepared for this to even be a risk, and that's on me. Part of me says I should have waited to update until I got home from work instead of updating during my afternoon break, but if I would have done that, then I wouldn't have been able to buy emergency paratransit tickets, and the situation actually would have been a lot worse for me. Of course, if I would have waited, I might have read about the issue first and avoided updating until it had been resolved.

Regardless, what's done is done, all is well now and I'm just going to chalk it up as a life lesson in maybe remembering to read about updates here before installing them, especially major updates.
I'm curious, though: for those who did not experience the VO disappearing glitch, did you update to iOS 18.7 first, or go straight from 18.6.2 to 26.0? Kind-a wondering if going to 18.7 first would have made any difference, but again, it's all water under the bridge now.

On my old backup device, which is the only one I updated to iOS 26, I did in fact update to 18.7 first. And yes, I was one of the unlucky souls who ended up with the No VO on reboot issue.

Well if you do not have this issue you are lucky. For those of us, is a major pain and having this issue 90% of the time is not nice.Long live cats.

People who still want to try updating regardless can always do a local backup from Finder on macOS or iTunes on Windows, then if anything goes wrong, simply rebooting the device in Device Firmware Update or DFU mode will allow you to completely erase and restore the system from a stable version that Apple is still code-signing. If you set a passphrase to encrypt your backup it will even keep all your tokens so you won't even get logged out of anything after restoring. That's what I did with for the first developer beta on my iPad, which I did install but got locked out of after enabling Developer Mode because it requires a reboot and it was not possible to enable VoiceOver before replying to a confirmation prompt after that reboot.

I appreciate you sharing that you went to 18.7 first. Not even sure why I am trying to theorize on what caused this no VO bug to strike, but at least that's one theory to eliminate.

I'm pretty sure I went to 18.7 first before updating. The odd thing is, as far as I can tell at least the reboot bug only happens once. At least it hasn't happened to me again.

After the initial reboot, and getting past this glitch, all subsequent reboot have been just fine. I've done the soft reboot option with the volume keys and side button, I've gone to settings, general, shut down, then held the side button the boot back up. And I've even used Siri to reboot my phone. All is well and good on my old SE 2020.

So far, I don't have any real major complaints about the update overall, aside from the voiceover glitch on that initial reboot. I will say though, and this is likely a hardware issue more than anything else, I don't like the way the voices sound on the old SE 2020. My current device, which is an SE 2022, seems to have way better speakers. Of course, that could simply be a wear and tear issue. The SE 2020 iPhone I literally got in 2020, while my SE 2022 iPhone I got last year, around February or March. So who knows. 🤷🏻‍♂️

This happened to me exactly a year ago. Spent the better part of a day trying to get my phone back. I was using a Siri voice then. I had to switch to a primary voice to initially get Vo working. I also had to call Apple support. I decided after reading initial comments that some were experiencing what I did last year made me hit the pause button on this update. Someone made reference in this thread to an update gone bad in IOS 13, & I can confirm I was caught in that net as well.

Here's the thing, I guess. There's a lot of variation in configurations, etc. Somethin's gonna go awry somewhere. Happens in Windows as well, & believe me when I say it's not just blind folks who are affected by these glitches. I do quite a bit of tech support & I see a lot of things going pear-shaped after updates in both OS's. It happens.

Apple did advise me that prior to an update, they would recommend switching to a primary VO voice. You can argue we shouldn't have to, & you'd be right. You also might not have your phone for awhile till you can get speech back. I personally would rather just do like they say & not have to waste time on support calls, but that's just me & what do I know? I do worry that those whose primary language is not English might have to switch to an English primary voice, but I don't know that of a certainty. I hope you folks whose native language is other than English will do some beta testing to see if that's an issue, but I get that it means having more than 1 device, & a lot of folks just can't, myself included.

Good luck, all.

I've rebooted since that initial hiccup, and haven't had any more issues, so perhaps that means that if you can get past it once, it'll never happen again, or at least it won't happen again until another update potentially brings it back. That is a major relief for sure.

Regarding voice quality, I've added a couple of the Siri voices to my VO rotor, and they sound terrible on my iPhone 16. In fact, I may end up removing them; they sound like compact versions of the voices, which is a bummer. I'd love to have the full version of American Siri Voice 4 available on occasion, but the version VO is letting me use isn't even remotely worth it. I'll probably just keep using Nathan.

Agreed. These days I use the standard Samantha voice, with Alex as a Rotor voice. With iOS 26, the voices sound real staticky, and lacking any base. I'm sure there is probably a better way to describe that, but, alas, I am no audiofile.

I got the VoiceOver showstopper bug on an earlier, beta version of iPad OS 26 that I finally installed on my iPad, and needed sighted help to fix. I was using Eloquence at the time. I haven't experienced it since, not even when I updated my phone fro 18 to 26. My phone uses the Jamie premium voice and I was afraid that the bug would show up because of that, but it never did.

This issue with VO not working was on beta 1, 2, 3. I could not use my iPad 9 until the beta 4. I did installed the RC on the watch and phone. Lucky for me VO worked for both. Feel for those who deal with this and do not have a sighted person who can fix it. Headache.

Didn't happen with me.
As for the negativity, I think enough people have said more or less the same thing. Software is fragile, and it's not paranoia but realistic advice of official documents all recommending to backup prior to updating, especially for a major version. In terms of software enshittification, this is really a soft case. Think of the ssd bricked because of windows 11. Whether or not microsoft were right about who was responsible, the point is that here apple has gone as close as they culturally can to a sorry guys. Microsoft didn't. And there are stories of this responsible for companies data loss... Food for your thoughts.

For me, things went very smoothly. I didn't experience this bug on either my 16 Pro or 15 updating directly to iOS 26. My wife also had no difficulties. Clearly, there are certain settings or criteria which trigger this problem. This seems to be the case with all of the major serious failures I write about in my book.
Many people with disabilities invest in these devices largely to make up for a lack of other soluetions to handle daily life in situations where local help isn't as available. For us, these can be absolutely critical issues. We're definitely a smaller portion of Apple's iPhone users, but bugs which stop accessibility features from working need to be more strenuously and systematically tested for before a major iOS release happens. We shouldn't be in a position where we need to worry that these expensive devices will be rendered useless by updating to the latest version. I'm happy to wait one or two releases for less critical bugs to be fixed. We're dealing with incredible complexity and I can imagine how these issues get missed or are less prioritized. However, it's absolutely unfair to pay the same money as everyone else does but have such a notably higher chance of being stuck utterly unable to use that device without help. If artificial intelligence can't do this, Apple should pay for testers to thoroughly and systematically check for such serious trouble spots with essential accessibility features before all major OS updates. At the very least, we should be confident that our accessibility feature will be there to let us unlock and access basic functions no matter our choice of particular configuration. There aren't an infinite variety of choices to test for this.
Regarding negativity, I absolutely get why people aren't patient or happy with this kind of bug. Despite all of my awareness of what a monumental task Apple is undertaking, it's hard not to feel that we should be beyond the point where anybody should need to worry about losing basic functionality. It isn't too hard to imagine particularly inexperienced people getting into serious situations. Apple really should up its game in this area. Experiencing a major iOS upgrade ready for public release shouldn't be the province of the particularly brave or well-resourced among people with disabilities. We are part of the general public.

Over all, voiceover is working. But bluetooth doesn't connect and when I go in to check settings on bluetooth or Siri, voiceover doesn't work. Hopefully the update will fix these issues. I will not shut down or re-start my phone for fear of losing voiceover all together. Will just put it on silent.

There you go. Agree 100% with you.

Hello,
What you need to understand is that sometimes, testing just isn't enough. I've been using iOS 26 betas since the very first developer beta, and I've never noticed this issue. If I was working at Apple accessibility, nothing would change, I'd still say that everything is fine from my viewpoint and that the release is ready. Does this suddenly mean that I don't care about accessibility or blind people? That's a very narrow minded conclusion that doesn't really help anybody and doesn't advance the discussion in any meaningful way.

It doesn't matter if Apple has one person or 10 people testing VoiceOver, if none of them experience the issue, it won't be flagged.

Now, we can blame the world about things being so unfair, and there are millions of sighted users who test each beta, so pretty much every single configuration out there is tried and tested by the point we get close to stable releases. If there is an issue which makes the display completely unresponsive under a specific configuration, it will be caught fairly quickly, just because there are infinitely more users. It's not Apple's fault, or any other company's.

We can talk about automated testing/using AI, but in reality, none of these things are perfect and they will never catch every single issue out there. If they were, we wouldn't have beta cycles at all, for blind or sighted, Apple would just do their own internal testing, and there you go, all bugs have been identified.

This in no way invalidates the frustration of those who have experienced this issue. If I had it, I would be extremely pissed off. So, I absolutely understand the negativity, the only thing I don't understand is concluding that X Y or Z doesn't care about accessibility at all or never does anything good whenever something horrible happens.

The right strategy, in my book, is constructively writing an email to Apple's accessibility team. Explain how the issue impacted you, why it had such a major impact, and recommend prioritizing releasing a software update as soon as possible.

On Apple's side, one huge win for accessibility would be if they designed a warnings system for this type of issue. Once they are aware of this problem, an alert could be presented if a VoiceOver user attempts to install iOS 26, clearly explaining the impact of the identified issue and recommending to wait for the next update. We could go a step further and say that iOS 26 should have been pulled once the issue was identified, but I don't really think this is a realistic expectation.

This is probably another thing worth taking to Apple's accessibility team. Whether it will be done or not, nobody can say, but it is a suggestion worth pursuing.

I pretty much agree with everything said above. I only have one issue, and not with anything in the above post, but rather with the following scenario.
As I have posted elsewhere, I was one of the unfortunate souls who updated my device to iOS 26, and lost all audio, including voiceover audio. It took me days to Come up with a solution for fixing it, which I did on my own. Through a ton of trial and error, and perhaps a teeny bit of patience. I managed to unlock my device without any sort of text to speech, nor sighted assistance.
My issue is this, what happens when you contact Apple support, and explain the issue in as much detail as you can manage, only to receive the following response:
"Hello, thank you for contacting us.
We are unable to reproduce this issue. Could you please provide a screen recording for us so that we may better assist you?"

Obviously, that is not verbatim, but I think my point is made. Many times when we contact Apple, we get that auto response, so my question is, how is One supposed to do a screen recording, if their device is bricked?

In my case, I had another Apple device which I, could, do a screen recording, but for most people, they only have the one device.

Bottom line; sure there's a lot of negativity against Apple, especially from the blind community. However, when we are left feeling like second class citizens, due to situations that happen often, such as my scenario above, does the negativity truly surprise any of you?
Speaking of negativity, what's worse, a few people expressing their negative views towards Apple, or 6 to 8 people complaining about those few expressing their negativity, with negativity of their own, against their negativity?

Please note, before the self-righteous decide to attack this response, I am not pointing fingers at any single person on here. I am simply making a point that we can't all be shiny happy people, when we frequently experience hardships anytime there's so much as a patch to the software which we quite obviously depend on in our daily lives.

Thanks for reading.

Sad the speach issue happen to me on my iPad 9 when beta 2. Needed a sighted friend and could not use the iPad 9 for 1 week. Lucky when I got the RC for the phone no issues. Long live cats.

Hello,
Of course, this is a perfectly valid frustration. You definitely can't provide a screen recording in this case.

We all know Apple is a huge company, and their support department is just one of many. They probably have to follow a certain process, i.e. always ask for a screen recording if you can't reproduce an issue on your end. While it definitely doesn't make sense in this context, I'm sure the person who is responding to your email simply isn't allowed to make a decision on whether it makes sense or not, it's just a part of the process they must follow. This can definitely be improved, but it's also worth keeping in mind that this is a really rare exception, one in which you absolutely can't provide a screen recording. In 99 percent of other cases, it would be possible. The best you can do on your end is probably explain why you are unable to provide a screen recording.

In regards to complaining about the negativity, my issue with it isn't even the negativity itself. You are fine to express your views in any way you want.
The bigger problem for me is that when I am here on AppleVis, I would like to get as much useful information as possible, like trying to find out which setting causes the issue, how it manifests, what is the experience like for other people, so I can try advising others what to do and what not to do. Your comments were actually a great example of valuable information, where you clearly outlined how you managed to solve the issue on your end, so this is the kind of thing I appreciate.
I really don't care about what issues Samsung had on its devices, what happened in iOS 13 or didn't and actually it happened on 16 and then we discuss this for 10 comments, how VoiceOver doesn't read notifications so everything sucks, in other words, pointless noise which doesn't bring any useful information.
You can obviously make an argument that I should just skip the things I don't like, except that I can't know in advance what is pointless noise and what is useful information, so we're forced to go through this basically same pattern that repeats with every iOS release, where someone has some complaint, so they feel the need to voice their complaint in every single thread on the forum, instead of just making a topic about their issue and then the interested people who aren't aware can read it, especially if this issue isn't even related to a new iOS release and is something you were having even before.

Essentially, it boils down to the fact I would like to know what are the issues people are having with a new iOS release, not why Apple sucks and how it's all bad and horrible so you should just endlessly whine and complain and that makes it all much better.

Anyway, you have a point as well that complaining about other people complaining brings just as much noise, so I don't think I have much else to say on this matter. We've been here before, and for some reason this seems to be just how discussions go on this website. This shouldn't be taken as any kind of blame towards the AppleVis team, I perfectly understand their angle too in regards to not wanting to be too strict with the rules, so maybe I should just start filtering out posts from certain users by default.

As always, thanks to everybody writing very valuable feedback about their experience with new iOS releases. While I am myself adventurous and don't mind installing beta, let alone stable updates, I certainly want to know what other people are experiencing so I can offer useful advice to less advanced users.

Hopefully we see 26.0.1 soon with this issue resolved.

Hi,
So, I totally agree with Michael Feir on this. This simply shouldn't have happened, and it isn't good enough for a multi-million dollar company such as Apple. People have every right to be upset about this, particularly if they're living on their own with no sighted assistance as is my case. I didn't have this issue because I updated from iOS 18.6 straight to iOS 26, but from what I've been reading on here, this bug seems to have affected those updating from iOS 18.7. I'm glad I never downloaded iOS 18.7, didn't even know it was a thing until I saw I could update either to that or iOS 26, so of course I went to iOS 26. I feel sorry for those this bug seriously inconvenienced. If this had happened to me, I wonder if entering the wrong passcode about 10 times or sso, and waiting about 5 minutes between every 3 attempts would have erased everything on my iPhone? I know that used to be a thing. If I had stuck to the middle of the screen and just pressed randomly, I wouldn't have called emmergency services, I would have just been entering random numbers. So after my iPhone was erased, at least I could just start again with my iCloud backup, and I'd have VoiceOver back. As regards beta testing and working for Apple, someone overseeing beta testing should encourage beta testers to try different configurations, and not just one. So for example, try updating from iOS 18.6 to iOS 26, and then iOS 18.7 to iOS 26. People working there should be testing with multiple devices and configurations anyway to catch things like this. They're paid to do this, so should have all the time and resources in the world, far more than a beta tester at home. And agreed with Nikola regarding the unnecessary comments about notifications on the lock screen being interrupted. This really is a minor bug, particularly as you can just navigate to the lock screen and read the whole notification again anyway. Yeah it's a bit annoying but not a showstopper, and has nothing to do with VoiceOver not activating after an update. And I hate scripts too. It just shows that the person dealing with Brian's query wasn't actually reading, or maybe they were but they still had to follow the script. Everybody's case is individual, and scripts really aren't helpful.

So 24 hours after my suggestion to make a local backup, Apple just stopped signing iOS 18 entirely, making it impossible to restore devices to iOS 18 if we end up locked out due to accessibility issues on iOS 26.

My Apple Watch Ultra 3 and AirPods Pro 3 arrived earlier in the afternoon, and I won't be able to take full advantage of the AirPods until I update any of my devices to macOS 26, iOS 26, or iPadOS 26, and the Apple Watch won't work until I upgrade my iPhone specifically, which I'm quite reluctant to do now that iOS 18 is no longer getting signed. My new iPhone will also not be here for at least another week so I'm kinda stuck with a brand new high-end Watch that is effectively little more than a small brick given these conditions.

Once you rely on something, specially something which costs this much, you expect it to work. I live alone, and I rely on my phone for making digital payments, no cash, it's inaccessible any way. If my primary phone were to stop working, I would be absolutely stuck. I wouldn't be able to pay for my food, for transportation, for anything. Further, my primary way of reaching out to my family for help, that's my phone, that would be a no go as well. I do carry a backup phone, but it's just because of incidents like these.

I just filled myself with courage and decided to go ahead and update my iPhone. To do this I disabled the security setting that prevents USB accessories from working when the iPhone is locked, plugged in a keyboard to Apple's USB 3.0 to Lightning dongle, which I also connected to power, then rebooted the iPhone, was able to enter the passcode using the keyboard, and decided to go ahead and install iOS 26 which is currently downloading.

My earlier suggestion to use a Magic Keyboard actually failed so I had to use a pretty normal Micro-USB Raspberry Pi keyboard instead. Fortunately I'm the king of cables and adapters so I always have a solution to all kinds of connectivity problems so connectivity ended up not being an issue. For some reason I was under the impression that the Magic Keyboard worked as a normal USB keyboard if wired, but apparently I was wrong.

I live alone and until my iPhone 17 Pro arrives next week my iPhone SE 2020 is the only mobile phone I have, so if I get locked out of it I lose the ability to use my cellular subscription. I do have neighbors though, whom I can ask for assistance as a last resort, but hopefully my current setup with a physical keyboard should be enough to unlock the phone even if VoiceOver ends up not working after the upgrade.

My iPhone SE 2020 just finished updating itself with absolutely no issues, as after the reboot VoiceOver just turned itself on normally, allowing me to enter the passcode, SIM PIN, and read the 5 pages of new features using the touchscreen before being allowed to finish the setup and get to the home screen. It does feel significantly less responsive than it did on iOS 18 though, as there's a noticeable delay in every action, not just speech but also audio icons, however the phone is also quite hot so it's possible that the CPU might be getting throttled due to the heat.

As for details, I was running iOS 18.6.2 before the upgrade, and all my Apple devices are set to use US English as the default language with Samantha Compact being the default VoiceOver voice. My iPad Mini A17 Pro still needs its software upgraded though, so I can try upgrading to iOS 18.7 before upgrading to iOS 26 to test whether that makes any difference.

After several hours, I tend to restart phone. Lucky you. Most people are dealing with this. I did the beta from letter A as apple and RC. No issues with my 16 pro max.

Thanks for this alert and comments. In situations like this one where bluetooth is unavailable or does not work, does anyone have a recommendation for a USBC wired keyboard for use with iPhone 16? I have not updated to iOS 2026 as yet, but I have experienced situations in the past when my functioning bluetooth Logitech keyboards would not allow me to type in an edit field? This happened to me most recently when I tried to type my Gmail and Exchange email account passwords into Apple mail using version iOS 18.6. Any advice on which keyboard to buy would be appreciated. Scott

Hello everyone,
Reading this post reminded me of something that happened to my friend last month. One day last month, she called me from another iPhone, saying that the VoiceOver on her primary iPhone suddenly stopped working. The symptoms she described were very similar to what's mentioned in the post: after restarting the iPhone, the VoiceOver speech suddenly disappeared. I asked her to try a force restart of the iPhone, which involves pressing the volume up button, then the volume down button, and then holding the side button. The iPhone restarted, but the VoiceOver speech still didn't come back. Finally, after about five or six hours, VoiceOver on that iPhone suddenly started working again. So, I sincerely hope Apple can investigate the root cause of this issue and fix it as quickly as possible.

Yesterday I updated my iPad Mini A17 Pro as well, this time twice from 18.6.2 to 18.7 to 26. Once more I disabled the security setting that prevents accessories from connecting when the device is locked, and once more I tried connecting an Apple Magic Keyboard to it through the iPad's USB-c port, which did worked as I expected originally, although once more the iPad just updated without any issues and VoiceOver came on normally after booting in iPadOS 26 so my precautions weren't really necessary.

Given that the magic keyboard worked on iPad, my suspicion that I might have just done something completely dumb when I updated the iPhone yesterday, like not plugging in the keyboard or trying to type without turning it on, was gaining a lot of traction in my head, I decided to test that setup again with the Apple Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter on my iPhone SE 2gen and my idiocy was confirmed. Therefore my original impression that these Mac keyboards work like perfectly normal USB devices when plugged in wired does stand, and thus I am back to strongly recommending keeping one around for situations like these, along with the aforementioned adapter, which, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, is a general purpose USB hosting device that supports most standard devices with the glaring exception of actual cameras.

Did I understand you correctly, that you updated a device to iOS 18.7, and then iOS 26, and did—not— lose VoiceOver, or audio in general, upon reboot?
If that is the case, then Tara's idea isn't what is causing this issue after all.

Yes, I did update my iPad twice, first to 18.7 and then to 26, without experiencing any of the reported VoiceOver issues in either case, although I was prepared to deal with them if they ended up manifesting.

This glitch is frustrating, with all of the potential settings individuals with iPads and/or iPhones have, it's gonna take some diagnostics on a device to figure this one out. Which begs the question, if you take a device, say to an Apple Store, that has been brick due to this issue, would they be able to diagnose The root cause?
I'm still wishing I had disabled passcode and biometrics, when I went through this update process. I still feel like that is a valid work around, since one can reestablish their passcode and biometrics, once their updated device is back up and running. The keyboard option is another good work around too, provided everyone has the necessary hardware to make a wired connection.
Speaking of wired connections, are there any Braille displays with built-in Perkins style, or Qwerty, keyboard functionality? I'm not referring to Bluetooth devices, but actual wired devices. Just wondering if those would work as well?

Edited for typos.

Someone earlier in this discussion said they did this with the Mantis, which has USB and a keyboard. The Help Tech Activator has similar abilities and I expect it would also work.

My guess is that having anything other than one of the very basic voices as default is likely causing this issue. An advanced or premium voice is not available on reboot and it crashes.

Ah, thank you for the tip. I must have glossed over that particular comment. 😅

Every year apple releases new iOS with changes and new code. Curious if the VO gets affected by the changes of the iOS. The basics of VO has not change. Wander if apple need to rebuild VO from the ground up. Yes, VO gets new features but the basic has not been changed. Perhaps this is why we are having bugs that keep showing up? such as VO and notification, VO always saying the time when getting messages? Recall in the past VO did not do so when getting messages. Just wandering, If anyone thinks this is negativity move on and do not poste your comments, just skip.

I'd say yes. VO is so heavily integrated into iOS, there's no way it's not getting affected with each OS update, even if only marginally.

PS Forget all of this sophisticated technology. Bring back the abacus!
... and chunky staplers! 😃

I think remembering playing with one!! How about just bringing pen and paper and sending letters in Braille. Let the PO send them. Or the pony express.

I absolutely agree with you. Premium voices are not available upon update, and have to be redownloaded, hence voice over not being available upon new update. I use the tessa default South African voice, and never experienced a problem whenever updating.

I've seen some of you mention that VoiceOver's use of enhanced voices caused this bug, but based on my friend's experience, that's not accurate. She uses the default Chinese voice, TingTing, and still encountered this bug. Furthermore, this isn't an issue that only appeared in iOS 26; it has existed since at least iOS 18.6. So, the root cause still needs thorough investigation.