Does anyone use VoiceOver hints?

By James Froggatt, 17 February, 2022

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi all, I'm a non-VoiceOver user and developer wondering - does anyone use VoiceOver hints?

My understanding is there's no way to access them unless you add a gesture. I'd be happier to include a few more, and recommend doing so to my colleagues, if I knew people actually set up a gesture for them, but for all I know right now this could be used by everyone, or used by no-one. Stats or anything or just your own first-hand experience of them would be appreciated.

Relatedly, are they suitable for important information? If an action's effect would be non-obvious to the user, updating something elsewhere on the screen, is a hint suitable, or should something to more reliably inform the user be put in place?

Thanks, and have a good day!

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Comments

By Lielle Ben simon on Thursday, February 17, 2022 - 20:56

Hi, I don't use them a lot but, wen I was a new to iPhone in year 2011 it helped me.
Sometimes wen I want to work with a new app I use hints.
There is no Jester but you can A assign new justerfor that.

By Holger Fiallo on Thursday, February 17, 2022 - 22:25

Never used it. Even when I was learning to use the iPhone and voiceoverfor the first time.

By Unregistered User (not verified) on Friday, February 18, 2022 - 02:41

I didn't switch off the voiceover hints because laziness.
What about the new assigned gestures and accessing the hints, it is supposed the user knows what he does. So, no need to have an access to these extra hints for the user's gestures.
Cheers!

By James Froggatt on Friday, February 18, 2022 - 20:30

Thanks everyone. There seems to be a trend so far, that the hints are mainly useful for beginners to the app, or beginners to VoiceOver as a whole, who are also aware of the capability for additional hints and enable them. You could maybe call it a tutorial mode. I'll bear this in mind when I set them up. Thank you!

By Yvonnezed on Friday, February 18, 2022 - 23:48

I certainly don't need them, given how long I've used voiceover, but I generally leave them active since at least a few developers over the years have used them for real information. I can't remember which app it was but it was something like a podcast app where the episode description was in VO hints.

By Siobhan on Saturday, February 19, 2022 - 10:56

Not sure what app you're developing, but for me, i also have hints off. To be frank they are usually a pain in the ass most of the time. But on the tutorial, it would help to say flick up to move the ball toward the net or something like that. Now must make coffee.

By Jo Billard on Saturday, February 19, 2022 - 11:13

There's always some new app I might try where I'll need them. If I don't want to hear the hints, I just swipe to where I want to go before they can start yakking at me. I could put hints in the rotor and turn them on and off as needed, but I'm lazy and at least they're there if I should need them. If I don't, I don't have to listen to them.

By Pilgrim Pete on Saturday, February 19, 2022 - 11:22

It was looking like I was the only one here who has kept hints turned on. Not because I routinely need or use them, but because I typically have moved on before VoiceOver has spoken them. They certainly don't bother me. And, like Jo, I find them occasionally handy when exploring new or infrequently used apps. Sometimes the hints alert me to some information or functionality I might otherwise not discover.

By Justin on Saturday, February 19, 2022 - 11:47

I haven't used them for years on my personal device, but I can confirm that having this setting off can be problematic in some settings, at least on the web.

On the web, if the setting is off, VoiceOver won't read any aria-describedby information. For those not familiar with web accessibility, that allows a form field or some other web elements to be associated with text on the page to provide extra information. For example, it could be used to associate an error message for a text field to that field so it would be read as part of the field's announcement. It could read something like this:

"Name text field required. Invalid data. Error: Name cannot be blank.

If you have hints off, the last bit of that which is read would be "invalid data."

As an accessibility pro myself, I really wish Apple would fix this.

By Yvonnezed on Saturday, February 19, 2022 - 23:00

Heck, the main reason I leave them on is that I don't want to use a rotor entry or gesture to activate them. I've got enough junk in the rotor already and it's easier to just do the next thing I want to do before the hints get spoken, ☺️