Need help with shutting up VoiceOver when any notification comes in... PLEASE!!!

If all else fails, try double tapping with three fingers to turn off speech before locking your phone. The only small downside is that you will need to do the same thing when you wake your phone up.

What you will need to do is go into Settings>Notifications and start turning off things in there, rather than in Accessibility, so that the notification doesn't even come on the lock screen. There's a whole bird's nest of settings and app settings in there, so you'll need to poke around.

I'm a bit annoyed myself about this behaviour but there is nothing to do about it as far as I'm aware.
I always put my phone with screen down as a workaround as you already pointed out.
Even more annoying is that this also seems to happen when my phone is muted.
So, I have to put the phone with screen down even when muted.
Apple should stop the behaviour of activating the device's screen when a notification comes in.
You can get that behaviour by removing the show on lock screen toggle.
This will prevent the screen to wake up but it will also not show the notification on the screen.
I like it to show on the lock screen when I press the side button but not waking it up automatically when a notification comes in.

I understand what you're trying to do now. One additional issue to this lock screen notification business for me is that VO is unresponsive to gestures like swipe up and down on the lock screen while chattering, so it takes the whole reading of the notification before I can clear it. Makes no difference if the phone is on charger or not.
Hope your bug report is addressed.

Hi,
Have you tried turning off the Voice Over setting called always speak notifications?

For me turning off Always speak notifications works. I also set my notifications to deliver quietly and some apps I only have badges on.

I hope your problem is fixed soon!

The reason this happens is because whenever a notification comes in, the iPhone screen automatically lights up so that a sighted user can quickly see what the notification is without doing anything with the phone. It is as if you pressed the sleep/wake button at the moment in time that the notification appeared, so VoiceOver acts just like it would do if you hit the button, thus reading the time and number of notifications.

As you noted, the behavior does not occur if the phone is lying face down. In this situation, the phone detects that there is something covering the screen and therefore does not turn the screen on for the notification, since it assumes that nobody can see the screen. This is an attempt to save battery life by not illuminating the screen unnecessarily. Since the screen doesn't come on, VoiceOver remains silent as well.

With an iPad, putting the device in a case and closing the cover has the same effect, preventing VoiceOver from announcing any notifications while the cover remains closed. If there was an iPhone case that had a cover which could be closed over the screen, then such a case may prevent the annoying behavior, but I don't know if such a case exists.

I have gotten into the practice of keeping my iPhone face down, or in a pocket with the screen facing toward my body, or in a similar position where the screen is completely covered by something. As long as the phone detects that the screen is out of sight, notifications should never light up the screen and VoiceOver should remain silent.

If you need VoiceOver to remain silent while the screen is locked and you are unable to position the phone as I described, then you'll either need to turn off speech or turn off VoiceOver altogether, neither of which is ideal since you'll need to remember to undo the action before using the phone again.

A potential fix for this behavior would be for Apple to offer a setting that prevents the iPhone screen from ever coming on while the device was locked, except when the sleep/wake button is pressed. Such a setting does not exist now, at least for notifications. You can disable the raise to wake feature, where the screen comes on when the iPhone is picked up, but that is a different situation entirely, and personally I'm glad I am able to turn that behavior off because of how often the screen lights up unexpectedly when I'm carrying my iPhone around in my pocket.

For me, voiceover will tell me there's one notification then read it out to me, it's a bit irritating but at the moment there's not much I can do about it.

I turned off youtube notifications in settings but I understand you don't want them off, just the sound, I don't think we can get that unless you turn your speech off.

It's drastic but I was going to recommend checking out android but then remembered it does the same thing.

The idea is a good one but if you just want a sound to play then it's not helpful.

I had a problem where Voiceover wouldn't read me the notification and that was my problem. It's worth experimenting with notification settings. They are easier to mess around with than they used to be.