Hi all,
Not sure if it’s just me but has anyone else had issues on the web client? It crashes a lot and when I’m reading something such as a post or chat in the free tables, and something new happens I cannot read that post or chat. For example, say you’re in the free table and you’re reading one message, if the table goes wild and sends you many messages the voice over will stop reading that message and go to the latest one. The only time i can catch up is if the table goes quiet for a few moments. It will not wait until the message has finished that I’m getting the new ones.
When I’m playing fast paste games like ducks, as soon as one takes their turn, it don’t matter that it was reading my previous turn. Typically in the past if i was in a game, it would read out the whole sentence and noises will play in the background or free table messages were going one at a time. I end up missing a lot of chat that happens in between turns because voice over decides I must know only the latest move or speach.
Am I the only one or is it my settings?
When it crashes i have no warning. The web just doesn’t respond and I just get the time display. The only way I manage to reconnect is if I get out of the Safari app on my phone and close it completely. Only when i reopen the app I am reconnected.
Thanks for reading. Hope you can advise soon

Hello,
have you updated to iOS 17.4?
Unfortunately, the message reading problem is an iOS bug that was introduced in this release. The latest message is always read, no matter what. It's extremely annoying, but unfortunately, as far as I have tested, nothing can be done.

The only alternative solution is to use a system voice, but this is going to be annoying as well.
Basically, in options, audio, you can switch the speech mode from screen reader to speech synthesis.
In this case, your system's TTS will be used to read incoming messages instead of VoiceOver. The drawbacks will be:

• You will need to manually configure the voice, the speech rate, volume, pitch, etc… The options for that are available below the speech mode option, if you set it to speech synthesis
• You have no way to make that voice shut up if you don't have a keyboard, it will speak as long as there are messages to read. With a keyboard, you can use ctrl to silence it.
• Apparently, as far as I have tried, on Safari iOS, it seems to be necessary to go to the options menu and configure the voice each time you connect. To be exact, entering and leaving the list of voices is enough, but if you don't do that, the web client seems to be silent.

The bad news are that the message reading problem is not fixed even in iOS 17.5, at least not in the first beta. Hopefully the later betas will resolve it.

About the crashing, I haven't experienced it, maybe someone else will have an idea.

Sigh ok thanks. So basically got to wait until apple fixes this.

Hello,
I'm bringing this topic back up just to say that the messages reading problem will be fixed in iOS 18.

Messages read as they should with no interruption, and in addition to that, we also have a bonus new feature, you can disable or enable ARIA live regions for specific websites. This can be useful if a website is misusing them, sometimes it happens that websites have useless announcements such as "Ad will end in 29 seconds", and then repeat that every second, so you will be able to get rid of that. This will also work to disable automatic announcements in native iOS apps.
On the Playroom, this means that as a bonus feature, you will be able to disable automatic reading of messages and enable it back whenever you want.

Of course, whether you will want to upgrade to 18 right away or not depends on the bugs it will have, however we are still too early in the beta cycle to comment on that. Let's see in the fall.

Thank you for this. Very much look forward to it. Do you know when it will come out?

Should be around the last couple of weeks of September, as usual for new iOS releases. The exact date wasn't announced yet however.

@nikola On the Playroom, this means that as a bonus feature, you will be able to disable automatic reading of messages and enable it back whenever you want.
It is a wonderful thing to have integration into such a platform with support for the automatic reading feature. I do not think it is stable on Android, even with the activation of the automatic reading features for variable content in the CSR screen reader. Unfortunately, I do not have a modern Android to test the features properly.
.

The only way to solve that is to contact the developer of that screen reader, unfortunately. I tried some time ago when users notified me that it does not work well with the CSR screen reader on Android, but I was unfortunately unsuccessful. Until something changes, you can either use TalkBack on the Playroom or use the browser speech synthesizer feature.