Closing Apps with Voiceover

I'm closing apps just by sweeping up with 3 fingers, as I always did since iOS 9.

I have never experienced the issue you mentioned above, however you can close apps another way.
1. Open App Switcher.
2. Flick left or right to whichever app you want to close.
3. Flick Up to access the "Actions" rotor option, then double tap on close.
4. The Action will remain on "close" this way, so just repeat the above steps, and double tap on "Activate" to use any of the apps in the App Switcher.

HTH. 😃

It’s even better than that. Once you’ve swiped up to close app, you can just leave one of your fingers on the screen then tap with the other to do a split tap which will repeat again and again. So you can close maybe 5 apps per second instead of 1.

The 1-finger flick up to close is the better way to go. But you still need the 3-finger swipe up or down in other circumstances.

3-finger swipe up works as normal for me. No hook to the right or left necessary. I wonder if cleaning your screen might help?

Take a look at how you're performing the 3-finger swipe up and down. You use the same gesture to scroll through long content such as options in the Settings app and dozens of songs in the Music app. Do you experience the same issue there?

Back when I was first learning VoiceOver, I was told to think of the 3-finger swipe up or down gesture as something like airplanes touching down to land, then immediately taking off again. When I perform the gesture, I'm not even sure all three fingers are contacting the screen at the same time. They probably are, for a millisecond or two. It's a very light touch.

Hope this helps.