Text editing on iPad with a hardware keyboard, has it improved in the past couple years?

Nothing has really improved. I used IAWriter, VoiceDream Writer, Scrivener, Pages, Notepad for iPad, and many other editing apps. The longer the text gets the more problems you will have navigating, editing and selecting. VoiceOver focus keeps jumping, and it may mean bashing your iPad into the nearest wall. Formatting a text was a nightmare, you can not reliably go through comments and revisions if they are provided in a Pages document. However, if you are getting it for web browsing and media consumption it is great for that, for basic editing and writing short text this may be fine but not that comfortable experience,.
I have used the iPad Pro for long time and this is an opinion based on long experience. I am myself tempted to go back to the iPad for its weight, versatility, great battery, amazing speakers and wide selection of apps, still the nightmares of typing and reading long texts are driving me away.
If you are really tempted, get the iPad mini 6, it has lots of the features of the larger siblings, but in a smaller budget. Find a a compact Logitech keyboard that can go with it.
HTH!

Just got iPad 9 with an Apple smart keyboard.

I'm on an M1 iPad Pro running Scrivener. Navigating by line works fine. But of the three - line, sentence, and paragraph, navigating by line is clearly the least useful. There is no way to navigate by sentence that I know of, As for navigating by paragraph, once upon a time I was able to do this with Option+Up or Down arrow. It sort of still works, but only reads the final line of the paragraph.

I wrote a blog about using an old 2012 iPad running iOS 10.3.3. Navigating by paragraph worked quite well on that platform. But anytime I tried to do serious work, the iPad bogged down and became sluggish, so I replaced it with the M1 iPad Pro. While it's much snappier, I'm sad to report that editing in Scrivener has become much more tedious, primarily because of the paragraph navigation issue.

Agree with above comments, it should be a company wide embarrassment that something as basic as text editing is almost always frustrating and often just not practical for a sizeable group of their customers. Even just basic use of arrow keys to move around a document often misses half a line here and there and its been like that for around 10 years. Its not good enough.

So, I have the iPad mini 6th generation which I love for content consumption and a little back and forth with editing. I've been considering the iPad as a laptop replacement for a while but stories like these put me off. I'm a writer so I need a simple and reliable workflow.

What I'm now using is a Mac mini and jump desktop and controlling it through my iPad. This gives the best of both worlds, though you do need a keyboard to make it all work. Also, of course, you need a solid connection, either mobile or wifi. There are a few other limitations, you have to turn voiceover off when using the remote machine otherwise there are crossovers with commands and there are some different shortcuts to avoid the same issue system wide.

The app is available in the App Store for Mac and iOS, I think it's about £20, as I recall. I'm super impressed with it and do intend to do a blog post on here about how to get set up and any pitfalls I've found along the way.

I do like iOS, as in some ways hit lets me feel a little unplugged with singular apps open at a time but that is also its flaw.

Oliver, I hope you do take the time to write a blog about your setup. I'd love to read it.

I have been using my iPhone with a bluetooth keyboard and Voiceover when traveling and I don't have access to my desktop computer.

I agree with the above comments. Although typing short notes and replies to e-mails works well, if any document is longer than a few sentences the experience is very frustrating.

Here are just a few things:

- Arrowing up and down a line at a time often only reads partial lines. This makes it very difficult to read a line at a time.
- Highlighting / selecting text seems to work erratically. Sometimes as I select a word at a time VO will speak each word as it is selected. Many times, however, when I select a word at a time, the first selected word is spoken but then words that are subsequently highlighted are not spoken as they are selected. Thus I can never have 100% confidence that I havbe selected the correct text.
- Even with the latest software and hardware, navigation is often sluggish.
- Spell checking is a nightmare and almost impossible. Doesn't make it easy to create documents one would like to share.

By the way, I first started observing such problems when using the MS Word app. I finally gave up on that and started using Apple's standard apps such as Notes, and Mail. Amazingly, I ran into the same issues!

Yes, this is not good. Can't believe Apple can't make simple editing and reading a pleasurable and easy experience on iOS devices.

--Pete

Although this website is a great starting point to gather information, I think it’s massively important to directly call Apple accessibility or email them. So many of the users on this website simply rag on each other about how things aren’t getting fixed. And I’ve noticed that many of those same people are making no effort to actually submit feedback. I’m regularly calling Apple accessibility. I’m regularly submitting bug reports. I’m regularly emailing Apple accessibility. And you have no idea how frustrating it is to hear the words this is the first time I’m hearing about this issue from an Apple accessibility representative. If they got at least 20 calls a day, there will be a massive incentive to make changes. However, most of the people that use voiceover only want to complain and make no effort to actually work for improvements.

Yes, it is important to also contact Apple Accessibility about such issues. That is the first place I usually post such problems or bugs. It is also important to post to this forum, however, since (a)It makes other users aware of the issues, and (b)Apple Accessibility must monitor these forums.

...and just to make it easy for people to contact Apple Accessibility and provide important feedback, here is their e-mail:
Apple Accessibility:
accessibility@apple.com

--Pete

all problems I encounter I report to Apple, and let me tell you all, I know most people do the reporting, still Apple is not listening. Some bugs are longstanding and have been reported numerous times. The funny thing here is some bugs have become part of my iOS experience, I can not imagine my iPhone or iPad without them.

While I too strongly advocate filing accessibility bugs I can't help but feel the energy behind previous comments admonishing us that we’re the problem because we don’t do this is … misplaced would be putting it mildly. Most companies, including apple as of late, seem to treat accessibility like a one-time project. You make voiceover, you add features here or there, on to the next line item in the development cycle. Probably apple’s accessibility team knows this is an issue. Probably that's irrelivant. Voiceover has been a robust screen reader for years after all and iOS 16 has to be tested. I’m betting problems this persistent can't be solved by apple accessibility because, as far as higher priority teams in the dev cycle are concerned, accessibility’s done and the accessibility team exists to test upcoming product releases. It's just as bad on the android side of the fence but at least there you have other screen readers if google won’t fix your problem.

I have never tried
https://ulysses.app/
before myself, though many people swear by that app when it comes to writing things (especially if it's Mark Down)! Though many would be put off by it, since it's subscription based.

I also wonder if Google Docs and its siblin of apps has improved with the latest iteration of the iOS family, for both Google's iOS/IPadOS app and using it via Safari on the web.

Yeah, I always report bugs too which usually results in a canned response, a promise they're looking into it or a requirement for me to demonstrate an issue that is well ranted about on here. I don't know about anyone else, but chasing down bugs is not why people buy expensive systems.

I'm certain, for example, that they are aware of the 'app not responding' bug that is present in safari and a couple of other home grown apps. I'm still getting it on my m1 16 gb mac mini and, I'm absolutely certain that it will be on the studio ultra. It just feels that we're bellowing into a void when it comes to long standing bugs which makes me understanding when people say they don't bother reporting anymore.

There are some bugs that will simply never go away now. Even if everyone emailed them regarding the 'safari not responding' bug, which renders their flagship web browser inoperable for tens of seconds at a time, I get the feeling they won't or can't fix it. We don't get this on IOS, so I can only guess there has been something baked in to mac OS that makes it impossible for them to fix... Even if other apps work better.

Anyway, do continue to report bugs, keep up our end of things at least and then we can point to letting them know. If they don't do much about it, well, at least we're in the right.

I stopped using Pages for the most part after trying to report issues with navigating between misspellings in long documents, and having to send several screen recordings, then getting gaslighted by Apple Accessibility. I also stopped reporting issues all together because the process seems much more trouble than living with most of the bugs.

As far as word processing and editing, I've always used navigate by line word and character, but never paragraph because I learned on basic text and RTF editors that only used the simple navigation keys on the keyboard, going back all the way to the Apple IIe in the 80s. I also break long documents up into small sections in separate files, then merge or compile them, like Scriviner and other writing apps do.

As I've said on this subject before, I have to admit I've never really had the frustrations everyone seems to have with editing on an iPad. I'll say that in general I hate using an iPad with only a keyboard, and almost never do it unless I'm in a weird situation like I have to plug the iPad in somewhere and I want to still work somewhere else. My usual tactic is to type and edit text with the keyboard and do almost everything else involving navigating using the touch screen. Don't ask me why, but for me it's just way faster.

Anyway, the thing I try to remember with the up and down arrows in particular is that what they speak when you use them depends on a lot of stuff, like where you are on the line and how big the text area is that you're using. As with a lot of situations on iOS it's sometimes hard to tell what's happening unless you can actually see the screen or have someone with you who can, but I think often when it's doing things like not speaking the whole line and such, it's possible what you want it to speak isn't visible. With iOS in particular I've had to watch that. So I've found that if I can't read line by line properly, making sure I'm at the beginning of the line and then moving down often sorts it out.

I think part of this is because in most text areas, it's not using word wrap. So essentially every paragraph is just one long line wrapped to the size of whatever it's being displayed in.

It also helps that my primary editing environment is Drafts. Not only does that have nice things like arrange mode and navigation mode and link mode that let you do things more easily, a lot of people have written actions for it. So if you do need a navigate by paragraph keystroke, you can write one. I don't, but I do have a keystroke that can jump between markdown headers that I use quite a bit.

People are missing the point. It’s not that people don’t report these issues. It’s that enough people don’t report these issues. Instead of the 4-5 people that just said they reported, there should be a list of at least 50 or 100 people that said that they reported something. If there’s 50 people that reported something, there could be 500 people that report a bug.Numbers always matter to these companies. They don’t fix something because they think not enough people are experiencing the issue for it to matter. Accessibility@apple.com is a good place to send an email. But, I would suggest that people call Apple accessibility and multiple times during the month. 1-877-204-3930. talk to someone about the issue. Make them reproduce the issue so they can see that it is a problem. They have devices that they used to reproduce the bugs.

I’m going to give you an insight because of my experience actually working with the company. They rank bugs based on how many people are reporting it as an issue. They don’t care about severity. They care about people reporting it. That’s why you’ll see a very small issue get immediately fixed because something like 3 million people are sending in complaints. When you call the 1-877-204-3930 number, they create a trackable case number for you. You can use that number and keep calling back and referencing that and hammering in the point. They don’t know what’s important to us unless we show that it’s important to us.

It’s sickens me to hear someone on this website saying that people think they’re shouting out into the void. I’ve had very positive experiences with Apple both as a user and as an employee. The void is this website. Because as stated, many of the people will come on here to complain and think that because the developers are somehow monitoring this website, that it’s going to automatically be fixed. They don’t care enough about this website to address specific issues because not enough people are actually calling them directly to complain. During the major beta cycle in the summer, there are accessibility bug testers. they spend their entire day going through software in Mac OS, iPadOS, and iOS, and watchOS looking for bugs and figuring out how to reproduce them. The managers of the team then determine the severity of those bugs. And then from top to bottom they rank what they think they can fix, what they think cannot immediately be fixed, and what they think people want to be fixed. And they regularly say it depends on how many people are reporting a specific issue.

Most of you are going to fight back on this. Most of you are going to say that you’ve already submitted a bug report. A lot of you are going to say something like Apple doesn’t care at all because they let a bug sit for 10 years. But I can say with confidence that the vast majority of the people on this website do not make the effort. And it tends to make me want to avoid websites like this. My problem isn’t even the creators of the website or the ones managing it. My problem tends to be with the users of the website have nothing better to do than to leave negative comments and waste everybody’s time. People that will say things like Apple doesn’t care and we should go to a different company and we don’t matter. Again, Apple doesn’t care because you don’t care enough. They’re out to make money. Sometimes making money is about saving money. If 10 people call about a bug, they’re mine said it’s going to be let’s hold on to this information and do nothing because it saves us money. If they really genuinely care about this being a bug, thousand people will call and then we have to fix it because it’ll save us money in the long run. But for the third time, most of you won’t even bother adhering to any of this information. There’s just gonna be another 15 messages below this one saying how communicating to Apple is like screaming out into the void and blah blah blah.

As @Holy Diver said above, VoiceOver was implemented as a feature, then developers moved on. Personally, I feel this was a mistake. VoiceOver isn't just a feature, it's a user interface system. Developers would never, for example, introduce mouse clicks as a new feature and then move on and forget about it.

Whether enough of us report bugs is moot, because we need more than a bug fix. We need developers to design and test the accessible user interface to the same extent as the sighted user interface. The naive response is that we can't possibly expect Apple to devote those kinds of resources to such a niche use case. But I disagree. It should not be unreasonable to expect developers at a major computer company that charges a premium price for their products to design for and test all supported user interfaces.

You do get some charmers on here, don't you...

Despite the obnoxious way the penultimate poster put it, they are right about quantity being the decider. Trouble is, we're already a tiny user base, when you include the older people who have sight issues and probably don't rely on devices for work, that number dwindles further.

Yes, everyone should report the bugs, I do, but numbers simply are not on our side, neither is time. Workflows on computing devices already take longer for those of us who rely on assistive technology compared with sighted peers. the last thing most will want to do is sit down for a bit of good old a/b testing, running down bugs or even reporting them.

there are a certain number of people who simply don't know how to use their devices and blame it on bugs. This number, I'd like to think, is small. The rest of us who report issues should be given some credibility by apple, I think that is the hardest part. Someone used the phrase 'gas lighting' earlier in the posts, and this is something that we are constantly facing on and off our computers. It's already a lonely thing dealing with a disability that other's struggle to understand, heaping this feeling on when trying to help a huge and superbly wealthy company refine its product, is sometimes just a little much.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but simply saying we need to rise up in droves is somewhat, forgive the pun, short sighted.

Stick that in your bla pipe and bla it.

So I haven’t worked at Apple but I’ve done enough accessibility testing and work at other large corporations to know how easy it is for companies to know when you’re calling them for the tenth time about the same issue. I file accessibility bugs. I do my best to follow up on them in the subsequent days and weeks as life allows. I’m confident if I filed the same bug 5 times and called about that same bug thrice daily it wouldn't get addressed any faster.

One does wonder if there's a black list of complainers... Something changed in my experience of Apple accessibility a couple of years back. I sent them a longish document with many spelling errors, and a screen recording of Pages only being able to navigate between the first few errors, along with a couple of other minor issues I was having, including Pages not reading a whole document with the two finger swipe down, which would have been too large a screen recording to email. Whoever I was dealing with focused on the least of my issues, and wanted more screen recordings. One of the minor issues turned out to be with how I was handling the order of gestures. All of my report was dismissed because of that single mistake on my part, without addressing the spelling navigation or the full document reading problems.
I don't want to play that kind of game, and it's easier to just find some other way to do document editing that isn't subject to the latest problems any given platform is having.

I fear, in that direction lies madness...

I do find multitple requests for help or bug reporting can dilute the point. Also, if they keep asking for screen grabs etc and. you don't have time to do it, explain this as long as you can give a way to recreate the issue, that should be enough, or better than nothing.

Would like to see a guide on here on best bug reporting protocol. I suppose it would follow a format very similar to that of the feedback app in beta releases of the operating system.

As @Peter mentioned above, when selecting by word, often the first word is announced and subsequent words are not. I could work around this if I had a way to announce the current selection, like VO+F6 on Mac. I just checked Apple's VoiceOver keyboard shortcuts and could not find a way to do this.

Checking on a solution for the read-by-paragraph problem, that same list of shortcuts has Option+Up/Down arrow listed twice: Once for "Go to the beginning or end of the paragraph" and once again for "Go to the previous or next paragraph". I would assume that, implicit in going to the next or previous paragraph would be reading that paragraph, as that's how pretty much all the other element navigation works: Focus moves to the element, and the element is read. But what we see in current iPadOS is that only the first or last line is read.

Rambling soapbox about the inherent problems of designing products based on user bug reports, deleted. Thankfully. LOL.

Hello,

I am not having an issue with text selection on my 11 inch iPad pro running the latest version of iPad OS. When I am selecting word by word it reads each one as I select it. It works both when using a keyboard or using text selection from the rotar. I wonder if you could reassign the keyboard command to move to beginning and end of a paragraph so option plus up or down would read the paragraph like its suppose to. Just some food for thought.

I don't have the problem with it not speaking selected words either, sorry to say, but I do have a couple of suggestions. Three finger tap on the text area seems to read the selection, which help says is read item status. No idea what the keystroke is, did I mention I'm hopeless using a keyboard for anything but typing? ☺️. The other thing that seems to work is leaving the text area and coming back in.

Tested these in the Notes app and Drafts.

The word selection issue is intermittent. Thanks for the tip about moving VO focus out of the text box, then back in, to get it to read the current selection. That will come in handy next time I encounter this problem.

The original post mentioned a problem with "select or navigate by paragraph". Selecting paragraphs doesn't seem to be an issue for me: Shift+Option+Up or Down Arrow does the trick.