Glaucoma takes the edges first. It starts with the peripheral vision and works its way in toward the centre, so for years the last thing I could see clearly was whatever was directly in front of me. When I used a computer, everything outside the screen was slowly going blind.
I had always had sight loss, and I was always losing more, but for a long time I didn’t need a screen reader. I needed a bigger font, then a magnifier, then a bigger magnifier. By the time I needed something like VoiceOver, I didn’t know it existed. I didn’t know what a screen reader was, or how you used one. The magnifier no longer applied to anything. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to learn.
From the lights going out to VoiceOver coming on was six months.
What I had in the meantime was a Windows computer with JAWS on it, a screen reader you pay for. It was better than Narrator, the one built into Windows, but it was more complicated and less intuitive, and paying for it every couple of years was a drag. When I could get it to work, the voice sounded cartoonishly robotic. Meanwhile my flip phone had become totally unusable. No more texting with anyone. Making a call was guessing and hoping. I was isolated.
Then one day I took a cab to my local phone provider and said I was looking for the new iPhone, the iPhone 4. I was alone. They were great. I left with one and VoiceOver toggled on. I’d figure out the rest later.
What seemed hopeless suddenly became normal, even easy. The world was back.
What is Apple VoiceOver?
VoiceOver is the screen reader Apple builds into every iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. It reads aloud whatever is on the screen and lets you run the device by touch or keyboard without looking at it. Nobody has to install it. Nobody has to configure it. It was already on the phone I bought that day, waiting for someone to turn it on.
This is not an article about every feature and command. There are thorough lists of gestures out there, and they are helpful once you need them. This is about how to get started, and what to know before you do.
Who it’s for
The obvious answer is blind people, and the obvious answer is what kept me from it for six months. I wasn’t blind. I was losing my sight. Those felt like different categories, and the second one didn’t seem to come with a screen reader.
So the honest answer is wider. It was designed for blind people, and it isn’t only for us. It’s for people who can’t see the screen today, and for people who won’t be able to see it next year. It’s for the week after eye surgery, and the migraine that makes a lit screen unbearable. It’s for the sighted relative who will eventually be asked how to turn this thing on, and would like to already know. It’s for anyone who writes: as a law student, hearing my own drafts read back to me would have caught more than my eyes ever did. And it’s for the person I was: someone who needed it and hadn’t been told it was there.
Turning it on
Two ways that work on every Apple device, and that will keep working after the next redesign.
Ask Siri. Hold the button you would hold for Siri and say “turn on VoiceOver.” This is the one to remember, because it’s the one that works when you cannot see the screen and there is nobody with you.
Triple-press the main physical button. On an iPhone or iPad that’s the side button or the Home button, whichever the device has. On an Apple Watch it’s the Digital Crown. On a Mac, hold Command and press F5, or on a laptop with Touch ID, hold Command and press the Touch ID key three times. Every phone I’ve set up myself has done this out of the box, from the setup screen onward. The one place it can fail is a phone somebody else set up without VoiceOver, where the triple-press may have nothing assigned to it yet, and assigning it is a setting you need to be able to see. Which is why Siri comes first.
It also lives in Settings, under Accessibility, if you’d rather find it than say it.
The first four gestures
Swipe right to move to the next thing on the screen, and left to go back. VoiceOver reads each thing as you land on it.
Double-tap anywhere to activate whatever it just read. Not on the thing. Anywhere. This is the one that takes sighted people a minute.
Twist two fingers on the screen like you’re turning a dial. That’s the rotor. It changes what swiping up and down does: move by heading, by word, by character, or change the speaking rate.
Double-tap with three fingers to mute the speech. Do it again to bring it back. If you have roommates, learn this one or get some AirPods. A phone talking all day grates on other people, especially at the volume you’ll want it at.
Those four will get you through a phone call, a text message and the Settings app. Everything else you learn on the day you need it.
The parts that are genuinely maddening
On my second day with the iPhone I did something and it said “Speech off.” VoiceOver was still running. It just wasn’t talking, and I had no way to find out why, because the thing that would have told me was the thing that had stopped. I had three-finger double-tapped without knowing it. Getting stuck like that stopped happening the day I could turn VoiceOver on and off, and speech on and off, without thinking about it. Learn those two before anything else.
Sometimes it reaches some limit of its own and glitches out, or stops responding altogether. Turning VoiceOver off and back on fixes it more often than it should.
VoiceOver being on doesn’t mean the app in front of you was built for it. In some apps the buttons were never labelled, so every one of them is announced as “button.” You will find yourself saying, out loud, “I’ve come all this way, I have the screen reader, and now the app doesn’t work?”
And iPhones update. The updates can change how VoiceOver behaves, and a brand-new version of iOS tends to ship with the most VoiceOver bugs. If you depend on it, let a big update settle for a few weeks before you install it.
Why “built in” is the whole point
So what’s great about VoiceOver that hasn’t already been said? It’s built in. You don’t need someone sighted to add something to your phone or computer to get it working. It already does.
That sounds small until you’re the person in the cab. I didn’t know how any of it worked when I walked into that store. I didn’t need to. It was already on the phone, and a stranger who’d never met a blind customer could turn it on for me in about ten seconds. I’d figure out the rest later.