I purchased Voice Dream Writer yesterday to take advantage of the $7.99 sale price. I'm running it on a 64GB iPhone 5 with iOS 8.1.3.
I'm running into some strange behavior with the app and am curious if others are experiencing anything similar. I was playing with the introductory document provided with the app and noticed that when I placed focus on the play button in the bottom center of the screen and then tried double tapping elsewhere on the screen to execute it, that nothing happened. I had to either split tap the play button or double tap precisely on it to start playback. I was under the impression that after giving a button focus, double tapping anywhere on the screen should cause its execution under default iOS VoiceOver rules. I decided to begin a new test document to check my typing with Writer. I am a long-time Fleksy VO user and admit I'm still looking for something that will let me type as fast as I can with Fleksy VO. I know that Writer is not an app designed for quick typing but it is a writing app so I thought I'd give it a whirl. After getting one sentence typed fairly slowly, I decided to check if I could zip over to Fleksy VO, type out a couple of sentences quickly, and then copy and paste them back into Writer. I discovered that with Writer running, Fleksy VO was pretty much incapacitated. The Fleksy VO keyboard did come up but pressing the keys resulted in no input at all. Fleksy VO was pretty much frozen. I then tried going to the App Switcher to jump back to Writer and instead of double tapping the Writer button in App Switcher causing it to open as is the normal behavior, it caused Writer to close. This also happened on other App Switcher apps I tried double tapping to open. They all closed as if I had done a 3-finger swipe up on them. I then tried going to various screens of my apps to launch other apps and it was clear that placing focus on an app icon and executing it was not working as it should under VoiceOver. I was getting similar behavior to what I experienced and previously described with the Writer play button. I had to reboot my phone by holding down the power and home buttons simultaneously to return to proper functioning. My experience with Writer and Fleksy Keyboard is giving me the feeling that whatever Apple had to do to enable developers to provide third-party keyboards was not fully tested with VoiceOver. When using one of these apps and then experiencing failure of normal VO gestures such as default actions when executing a button and the failure of the normal methods to initiate execution, I am very hesitant to experiment further with these apps. The potential cost is just too high for the marginal benefit of the app. I already deleted an entire important text message thread when trying the Fleksy keyboard because the default open action got stuck on delete when I tried opening a text message thread. I'm wondering how many iOS upgrades or app upgrades it's going to take to get third-party keyboards implemented with VoiceOver functioning properly. Have others experienced anomalies when using Writer similar or different to what I've described? I know there were several posts about the Voice Dream voices not working with Writer initially but if there were others which discussed other problems, I didn't see them. Thanks for any comments you can provide. Alan Lemly -- The following information is important for all members of the viphone list. All new members to the this list are moderated by default. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. The archives for this list can be searched at http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to viphone@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
