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VoiceOver Weird Reading of HTML

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From: Jamous, JP
Date: Aug 20, 2016 4:50PM

Does anyone know why in the world VoiceOver on iPhone reads HTML in a goofy way? Here is what I mean.

<h1>
Welcome to Jepelsy &reg;
</h1>

If I swipe left to right or right to left. VoiceOver selects the text in the H1 and reads it without the registered sign. I have to swipe again for it to select and read the registered sign.

The same occurs with text that is bolded in a paragraph, a span in a paragraph, etc.

In other words, whenever it notices any HTML markup in a parent, it separates it as a different swipe, which makes the user think it is a word on a separate line. In reality, it is breaking the structural layout of the paragraph or heading.

It is really quite annoying because it leads to excessive swiping for no reason.

I got a hold of Apple about it and they sent me to their Safari ticket dashboard. I did not notice anything related to my issue. They asked me to file a bug there.

Does anyone know why it does this by default? I have an iPhone 5 running 9.3.4 It even does it on my iPhone 6 and 6S.



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Jean-Pierre Jamous
Digital Accessibility Specialist & Developer
UI Accessibility Team

The only limitations in life are those we set for ourselves

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