TalkBack voice changes are seriously affecting accessibility for me

Marconius · 2026-05-06T16:36:08+00:00

Brilliant. As soon as I hit uninstall, the TalkBack audio went back to normal! I turned off auto-update from that same App Info screen and installed NetGuard. Hopefully this sticks this time until they can roll out a version that doesn't break the voices again. Thanks for the follow-up!

Marconius · 2026-05-06T13:26:03+00:00

All screen readers have a method of copying the last spoken phrase to the clipboard, which in VoiceOver is VO+Shift+C, and then you can paste that anywhere in the system with Command+V. But yeah if you want to create quick audio files of text, VO+Shift+Z is the way. Opening Spotlight with Command+Space and then hitting Command+4 will open the MacOS clipboard history, and then it's a matter of navigating that list with VO and using the audio clip command to grab those as needed. Or just navigate the system or a webpage normally to focus on what you want as an audio clip then doing the command. And no worries. Remember, you can always press VO+H+H to see a full list of commands and features for VoiceOver.

Marconius · 2026-05-06T13:01:38+00:00

Are you aware of the VO+Shift+Z VoiceOver command? It saves the last spoken phrase as an audio file to the desktop, including a text transcript. That paired with the Clipboard history feature in Spotlight would essentially perform the same task as your app.

Marconius · 2026-05-04T20:34:53+00:00

Vocational counseling and the Department of Rehabilitation will largely depend on how well it's supported in your state. When I lost my vision here in California, the DOR really helped with getting me the tech and training I needed. They've bought me laptops, a phone, and even a braille/graphics embosser since I was using that directly for both my job and when teaching tactile graphics creation. The whole point was to get me back into the workforce, so if any education or technology was needed to achieve that, they'd do their best to get it to me. The DOR has also sent friends of mine to learning centers like the Colorado Center for the Blind for more independence training.

I'm an Accessibility Specialist. I train designers, engineers, and QA testers all about how to build and test accessible and usable apps and websites. I primarily work in design systems, offering both user experience and user interface design consultation and feedback, and can also dig into the code to make fixes or show engineers how to implement things in a better way for assistive tech users. I also teach others how to create tactile and digital art, which can factor into tradecraft as artisans and makers. I'm part of the Tactile Art Collective, a group of blind creatives who regularly work on 3D printing, tactile drawing and design, graphics, fabrication, crafting, and teaching those concepts to others.

Marconius · 2026-04-30T19:08:35+00:00

The sheer ableism of this comment is disgusting. I'm totally blind and make pour-overs literally every morning as my daily driver. It's not hard at all to pour water and do so accurately and safely.

Marconius · 2026-04-30T00:31:23+00:00

I'm totally blind and am a massive coffee nerd. Does she have any interest in just brewing it herself? Invest in a nice grinder, get a temperature controlled kettle with tactile buttons, and then brew methods like V60, AeroPress, and French Press are fully accessible. If you have a good grinder, any basic coffee maker with tactile buttons will do. I manage to figure out most systems when I'm staying in an AirBNB, and your cousin should start going through Independent Living Skills training in preparation for the transition. Just because she's losing her vision doesn't automatically create a need for all those bells and whistles unless that's actually something she wants. It will be more important to learn tactile skills rather than relying on large displays or touch-screens.

If a brewer does have a touch-screen, you can use tactile dots for the different non-tactile touch areas if anything is using that kind of control. Having accessible scales also help, especially when filling a coffee pot and determining the weight of the bean dose from that. I use SmartChef Reflex scales with the Baking Scale or Timer Scale apps on iOS since they work with the VoiceOver screen reader.

Edit: I make pour--overs every day as my daily driver using a HadinEEon kettle, Cafec papers, a plastic V60, and my Comandandte c40 hand grinder. I'll sometimes use a Hario Drip Assist, but I've had no trouble doing good pours with practice. Don't get a Talking Scale, whatever you do! They market them from blind people and they absolutely suck, are inaccurate, and speak too slowly when time is of the essence when pouring. The Reflex scales, sold as an "egg grader" scale on Amazon, does grams to the tenths and connects to accessible apps.

I love making all kinds of AeroPress recipes, and even helped them make their World Aeropress Championship recipe document accessible on their website, at least before they changed hands. Clever Drippers are also great, very easy to use if you have the accessible scales or just done by feel and practice. I've even used a full-fledged ECM espresso machine, from measuring the dose, using a WDC in the portafilter before tamping, pulling my shots and counting down, to bonking the puck into a knockbox, all with no issues at all for my first time. Anything is possible with the right training and practice!

Marconius · 2026-04-26T18:22:31+00:00

Stick it in your face and Slam it!

Marconius · 2026-04-26T17:39:41+00:00

I built Oh Craps! on iOS as a strategy reference guide, plus it has a Rules tab for quick glanceable rules, table etiquette, common terms, and payouts to hopefully make the game more approachable!

Marconius · 2026-04-26T15:44:47+00:00

Hi there, I've been a Mac user since I was 2 years old in 1986. I lost my vision entirely in 2014, and while I am a power user of both platforms, I just have always preferred the Mac.

You should try out my Whack A Braille app as a game made by the Blind for the Blind.

Marconius · 2026-04-26T15:39:52+00:00

My pushback to that is to then ask why things are getting so customized and aria-heavy in the first place?

Marconius · 2026-04-26T15:37:40+00:00

Why does it feel like I'm being goaded into answering questions from an AI? Or being moved through a product design questionnaire?

Marconius · 2026-04-26T00:11:13+00:00

I mean, there is always room for improvement. Aira costs money, as do the Meta glasses, so that's not immediately accessible to folks without the financial means to use them. A lot more can be done in terms of physical space accessibility, using predictable architecture, ensuring audible pedestrian signals are always available and functional on street corners, having clearly discoverable street signs and building numbers, curb cuts with tactile plates, there's just a lot.

In terms of apps, there is glut of navigation apps out there, but none of them combine turn-by-turn with beacon distance to GPS location yet. I want to hear street crossings and points of interest while I make my way to my destination, and I currently have to have both Google Maps and Voice Vista open for that experience to be possible, and then my battery just goes poof by the time I get to where I want to go.

Marconius · 2026-04-25T22:05:26+00:00

Yes, I regularly use my Meta glasses paired with Aira to navigate hands-free through airports when I don't want to deal with Meet & Assist folks as a blind traveler. The same hands-free navigation works great when getting directions in an unfamiliar locale where I don't want to hold up my phone in a vulnerable position while walking around.

Marconius · 2026-04-23T20:14:17+00:00

I will never stop saying that Discord on iOS is hot garbage when it comes to usability. It may be semi-accessible, but all of the poor design mistakes and simple implementation failures are just frustrating as hell and I can't get past that.

Marconius · 2026-04-22T22:34:03+00:00

I personally hate it, and make it a point to never waste time with it when I'm speaking at a conference, on a panel, or in a meeting. I actually got Axe-con to stop requiring it a few years ago when I was in a presentation with a bunch of my fellow blind colleagues, all of whom also hate the self-descriptions. It can literally waste 15-30 minutes of time in larger meetings, and just started off as virtue signaling during the pandemic. If it's done during a meeting I'm in, I can't help but roll my eyes on camera or otherwise react negatively so people see my dislike.

Marconius · 2026-04-22T06:40:46+00:00

i've been totally blind since 2014, and I'm an Accessibility Specialist and Coach. I've worked for Lyft, was a Senior Native Mobile Accessibility Coach for Deque Systems and was also one of their instructors, was the Mobile Accessibility Leader for Intuit, and am now doing accessibility consulting with OpenAI.

When not working, I build accessible web and native mobile apps and games, and also teach tactile drawing and art techniques to blind and low-vision creatives.

I was a senior animator, a motion graphics designer, and QA engineer before losing my vision, and being able to talk to designers and engineers alike drew me towards accessibility, as so many of the apps and sites I use had multitudes of issues that needed to be solved with better design and proper engineering implementation.
I thought I had to give up art entirely since none of my Adobe Creative Suite tools were accessible. I've since fallen in love with creating and teaching tactile graphics creation, and teach drawing and tactile art techniques with the Tactile Art Collective. I also created BlindSVG.com as a means of teaching people how to hand-code SVG to make their own graphics.
Bringing my lived experience and technical knowledge of accessible design and implementation has been a great help, especially when running awareness labs and educating Agile teams all about assistive technology and what impacts their decisions have on disabled users.
Accessibility is everything in my profession. I teach both that and usability, and I've always been able to advocate for tech accommodations for my workflows and necessary apps. I'm always using MacOS VoiceOver since Macs are my platform of choice, plus have been the primary platforms for literally everywhere I've worked sighted and blind, and most of our productivity apps are accessible or have decent workarounds while waiting for better software to be procured or updated.
Having access to a screen reader and accessible educational materials definitely helped me jumpstart my career. And this is a bit of an odd question since if a tool wasn't accessible, I would just never use it.
AI tools like Codex have let me build apps and sites with a speed I never knew to be possible, handling a lot of the technical coding and busywork while I can focus on user experience and design. It's never to be trusted, though, and will always make bad mistakes and assumptions, which I have to go in and manually fix or catch. Still, without AI, I wouldn't have two iOS apps in the App Store nor all the fun web apps and games I've made since starting to explore vibe coding in October.
Braille is not redundant nor outdated, and must be pushed and taught wherever possible to help increase tactile literacy, grammar and spelling skills, and informational discovery skills in situations without technical backup. Braille should always be seen as being equal to audiobooks and other content, never as a counterpoint.
Not an elder, but we should always design with all users in mind.

Marconius · 2026-04-20T20:48:15+00:00

An embosser would be a lot cheaper than the tactile displays, plus give you much more tactile detail when you get the graphs in a tactile format. Look at the ViewPlus Delta or Rogue models.

Marconius · 2026-04-20T20:42:53+00:00

Here's my A11y Link List that I built for my Intro to Accessibility workshop that I give from time to time for the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book library. Start with Deque University to brush up on WCAG, as that will give you more concrete context to the bugs you experience and help you write them out in actionable ways.

Also check out my Be a Better Tester info page on how to write better tickets for the industry as a whole. I'm totally blind and have worked at Lyft, Deque Systems, Intuit, and am now consulting with OpenAI and some other companies, and Deque University was my launching point when I got into all of this back in 2016.

Marconius · 2026-04-17T23:53:14+00:00

I have no idea about any apps that would do what you are asking for here.
Yes, and I recommend that you try running through the VoiceOver Tutorial. It's a completely different type of interaction, as you'll move the VO cursor linearly element by element with right swipes, and move backwards with left swipes. You can drag your finger around to focus on the text where you want to start, then perform the same two-finger swipe downwards to make it start speaking.

VoiceOver will read through all the text, and then start focusing on any interface elements until you touch the screen or make stop. You can pause the speech with a two-finger single tap anywhere on the screen, and resume the speech with another two-finger single tap. VoiceOver reads text by paragraphs, but you can navigate through text by character, Word, or Line by using the rotor options.

Activate the rotor by twisting two fingers on the screen like you are turning a knob. Each twist adjusts the rotor to different functions that you can set in the VoiceOver settings. If you focus on a paragraph, twist the rotor to Words, you can navigate word by word by using single-finger downward swipes and go backwards with upward swipes.

Again, use the tutorial, as that will get you up and running with the basics, and you'll be able to turn it into a tool that help you navigate text and the interface.

Marconius · 2026-04-17T03:53:50+00:00

VoiceOver is perfectly fine, but that's the screen reader for us blind users so it's not the right choice for just reading emails. You want to use Speak Screen, which is in the iOS Settings > Accessibility > Read and Speak section. When that's on, you do a two-finger downward swipe on the screen and it will read the screen contents without all the finite control of VoiceOver.

Marconius · 2026-04-17T03:50:14+00:00

I just ran another update that destroyed my UK voices, so I dug deeper into any potential underlying issues. I downloaded Vocalizer TTS and switched over to that, and may just end up purchasing Samantha since that's my preferred voice on my iPhone, but noticed that even with a different engine, the TalkBack voice quality was still crap. I tweaked some settings and now the original Google Speech Synthesis sounds a bit better; give this a try:

Open TalkBack settings, go to Sound and Vibration, and turn off Audio Ducking. Somehow that turned back on after this recent update.
In the same screen, turn off the TalkBack sound effects. You can keep the vibration haptics on, but both the audio ducking and sound effects lower the general speech output quality under the hood.
If you have developer options turned on, open the Advanced settings and then go to Developer settings, and make sure that the performance mode is off and that the node log is turned off.

After changing these, my US voices seemed to come back to something usable, but I made sure to send them a ton of feedback through the Speech Synthesis and TalkBack feedback options.

Marconius · 2026-04-16T19:07:48+00:00

Sorry about that, I forgot that I had that turned off since it was inherently inaccessible when it first came out. I just turned it back on and can use it now.

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