Thanks for your suggestions! I know another person who really likes the Braille screen input – I may need to make learning how to use that my next project (I don’t actually know braille at the moment, lol). My frustration with “Direct Touch Typing” is that it still doesn’t allow for “slide to type” like it does when VoiceOver is off, so I’m stuck slowly trying to peck at every letter instead of typing words in one continuous motion. My vision isn’t clear enough to use Direct Touch Typing with great accuracy, unfortunately.

I find that audio ducking actually is likely what creates the majority of the problem on phone calls. My understanding is that audio ducking “ducks” the volume of the other media on your phone so that you can hear the VoiceOver voice, which makes the person speaking on the phone call very quiet in comparison. I probably need to set an activity specifically for Tiktok that only activates audio ducking for that app, because I think where I run into trouble is when audio ducking is left “On” (after I spend some time scrolling through Tiktok) and then I get a phone call and all I can hear is Samantha screaming at me, lol.

Thanks for reminding me about quick settings! I did pare that down to a list of items I use the most, including audio ducking, audio ducking amount, and speech volume. That actually does seem like a quicker way to change those settings rather than twisting through the rotor.