Products · Product
VoiceOver
Raised as a usability problem by 20 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2013–2026), in 19 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Key combinations are hard to remember, making VoiceOver hard to startUnreviewed
20132026- Key layering in VoiceOver and macOS makes it very hard to use2026-04-22
- People open VoiceOver but don't know how to use it intuitively and struggle to close it2023-10-08
- Text-to-speech on iPhone VoiceOver is astonishingly difficult to use2021-08-13
Touch interfaces add slow gesture steps for blind usersUnreviewed
20132026- Blind users' voice speed is set unbearably slow, limiting what they use2026-05-19
- VoiceOver is far less effective for quick navigation than NVDA, hard for blind users2024-03-05
- Visual touch interfaces with VoiceOver add slow gesture steps for blind users2017-03-11
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 26 complaints
- VoiceOver bugs go unfixed for years, leaving blind users stuck2026-11-01
- Blind users' voice speed is set unbearably slow, limiting what they use2026-05-19
- VoiceOver becomes sluggish, hangs and crashes, losing focus on large pages2026-04-24
- Terminal screen reading is virtually unusable; new output interrupts what was already being read2026-04-24
- Key layering in VoiceOver and macOS makes it very hard to use2026-04-22
- VoiceOver cursor randomly jumps away from selected item, so double-tap invokes wrong thing2025-03-04
- VoiceOver is far less effective for quick navigation than NVDA, hard for blind users2024-03-05
- VoiceOver focus jumps about a second after opening a new screen2023-10-09
- Ignores many modern ARIA attributes, so intended screen reader behaviour can't be achieved2023-10-09
- Voice control and VoiceOver interfere; hard to combine for users with hand tremors2023-10-09
- People open VoiceOver but don't know how to use it intuitively and struggle to close it2023-10-08
- Deeply nested panels and non-deterministic actions make VoiceOver navigation frustrating and error-prone2023-10-08
- Custom right-click menus are unusable for screen reader users2023-05-24
- Tremor makes VoiceOver's swipe and tap gestures unusable for her mother2023-05-16
- Braille display disconnects when opening notification center; book scrolling stops working2023-05-16
- VoiceOver freezes for seconds on websites and works badly with Google Docs2023-05-13
- Gives no positional context and doesn't announce screen changes, so setup is hard to follow2022-04-26
- VoiceOver felt very buggy, and the developer gave up after a week of effort2021-09-26
- Text-to-speech on iPhone VoiceOver is astonishingly difficult to use2021-08-13
- Speech-plus-touch screen reader is roughly a third the speed of normal use2021-05-27
- Touch gestures are completely different from normal iPhone use, making it easy to get stuck2021-05-15
- Screen reader is unusable at comfortable speeds, must be set to very fast reading speed2019-09-04
- VoiceOver's terminal support is poor enough that a developer wrote his own screen reader2019-05-26
- Visual touch interfaces with VoiceOver add slow gesture steps for blind users2017-03-11
- Hard to use at first because keyboard navigation differs from the commander's usual habits2015-05-15
- Key combinations are complicated and hard to remember, making VoiceOver difficult to start with2013-03-10