Speak Screen skipping words after coming across ads, unicode, alternate alphabet characters

I use the speak screen accessibility option to listen to books, articles, forum threads, etc while I work. I have been doing this for years, across several iphone models. As long as the text is free of commercials with outside links or any foreign alphabet characters it works just fine. But the moment the screen reader gets to a link with strange characters, a paragraph or a commercial containing text in non-Roman alphabets, uncommon unicode characters, etc, the screen reader stops reading sentences and starts to only read a handful of words per sentence. This glitch is especially prevalent when I read forums or chat logs containing kaomoji; kaomoji use several uncommon unicode characters, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Hebrew, and Cyrillic letters, and other unusual characters one right after another, which makes the screen reader’s skipping problem even worse. On the plus side, it would be easy enough to replicate the glitch by dropping several different kaomoji into a document and having the speak screen/screen reader read it aloud.


When the screen reader starts skipping, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the words it skips. Sometimes it has a better time of picking up improper nouns, struggles with verbs and adjectives, and completely drops proper nouns, simple articles, conjunctions, and other filler words like “a,” “the,” “and,” “to,” “like,” “as.” Other times simple articles and conjunctions are the only words it reliably picks up. and sometimes the screen reader doesn’t skip words, but starts mispronouncing things instead— pronouncing “doesn’t” like “doyentuh”, “their” like “dair”, “the” like “thee” or “dee”, “isn’t” like “eesunt”, and reading punctuation aloud, to name a few.


In case it matters, the voice I use most often is the British English Siri Male. but I have learned that at the very least Samantha, Kate, and Daniel also have the same problems. I can’t speak for the others because I’ve never used them before.


The only way I’ve been able to fix this problem is by stopping everything, switching to another voice, going to another app or webpage, and starting the screenreader on that page to basically “reset” the first voice’s speech parameters. This works more often than shutting down the phone entirely. But this isn’t a permanent fix, and the glitch just starts again the next time the screen reader gets to a unicode symbol or non-Roman character it doesn’t like. Is there any way to fix this permanently without needing to stop everything every 5-10 minutes to reset the voice? And if there isn’t a way to DIY it, can Apple fix whatever coding issue is causing screen readers to skip around? I know other people have had problems with the screen reader software skipping words and paragraphs before too, though I haven’t been able to find anyone talking about this specific problem.

iPhone 12, iOS 14

Posted on Feb 13, 2022 6:28 PM

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Speak Screen skipping words after coming across ads, unicode, alternate alphabet characters

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