Hi all,

I have found that when using the Progressive Web App (PWA) on iOS, game announcements are inconsistent or lacking. Even when focused on the app, mostly all it does is give me a tone when it's my turn. This leaves out crucial context clues in most games, which are announced in full when using the web client in Safari. It sounds like a bug, but if not, is there any way to fix this?

Thanks,
Daniel

Hello,
yes it's a bug, but I haven't found a consistent way to reproduce it. If you have any idea when or how this happens, it would be good to mention it.

On the good news side, yes, there is a workaround.
Open the PWA and while in the main room, go to options, then channels and views. Find game messages in the list of channels, and change speech from "Only when active" to "Always". Then, you will also want to change sound playback to always.
If you want, you might as well do this to every channel in the list, and this will be saved so you shouldn't ever need to do it again.

I recommend doing it to all the channels, because on iOS, this anyway changes nothing other than fixes this problem. The setting is supposed to make messages speak or sounds play even when the web client is not focused, but on iOS this is anyway not allowed by Apple, so this won't do that. This setting only works as intended on MacOS/Windows, and even there only partially, because I don't know of any screen reader that announces live region updates in the background (perhaps Jaws, but I doubt it), this is simply not allowed due to frequent misuse and abuse of live regions.

On the technical side, for whatever reason, sometimes the web client PWA thinks it is not focused and applies the channel reading settings (by default game messages don't read when inactive). I often noticed this if a popup appears, for example the permission request for the motion sensor or I invoke Siri, something like that, then the Web client gets into this weird state you can't get out of. I have noticed that swiping around the screen helps and the messages/sounds are normally triggered, but if you leave it idle for a bit, it again thinks it is inactive.

It would be good if it was fixable, I've briefly talked about it during the relevant beta session, but then I took the approach where I suggested completely removing the if active/inactive/always channel settings as they're partially useless, maybe that was the wrong way to go about it.

Anyway, hopefully the workaround helps and solves the issue.

Hi Nikola,

Very helpful, thanks. In contrast to you, I find there's no consistent place where I can focus and all messages will announce. Sometimes it will announce one turn, but then it will stop. I will set the channel views as you suggest.

Thanks again,
Daniel