iPhone Stuck on Login Screen with Voice Prompts (VoiceOver) Enabled

Mindwatering Incorporated

Author: Tripp W Black

Created: 02/05/2018 at 01:36 PM

 

Category:
OS X Tips & Hints
General Mac Tips

Issue:
iPhone or iPad received / installed an OS update. After reboot, it had the standard Hello screen but VoiceOver was also enabled and except for the home button, no other keys seem to work. It is seemingly impossible to login, as the Siri voice just repeats the number you enter with the alphabet letters for that number, over and over, and over and over.

You cannot connect it to a Mac to do a restore because you cannot login to unlock the phone. After a web search, I found that Accessibility feature uses touch and tap, where one finger touches and holds the selection, and another finger has to tap anywhere else on the screen to get the held down action to take / work.


Solution:
As mentioned above, with VoiceOver the touch screen doesn't behave intuitively. You have to tap and hold, and then tap anywhere else on the screen to basically commit / do the selection.

If Siri is operational, you could just tell Siri to turn it off by via the home button; however, she was not available. (My assumption is since this a setup login, and the wireless is not yet chosen, she has no way to get to her brain in the cloud / Internet).

The following steps are needed:
1. Enter code
2. Click Settings (hopefully it's on your main screen, or in a folder on your main screen)
3. Choose General --> Accessibility --> VoiceOver --> click to disable toggle "button", and then confirm to turn the feature off.

1. Passcode:
So to enter a passcode of 1, 2, 3, 4, you hold you finger on number one (lightly works just as well), and then tap, with another finger, anywhere on the screen. You will finally see one of your passcode dots entered at the top. Now repeat for the rest of the passcode.

2. Settings:
Once you get to the main screen, click the Settings icon twice quickly, or touch and hold Settings and tap with another finger elsewhere.

In our case General was not visible (too far down the list). Therefore we touched and tapped the lowest entry visible to get into that menu, and then touched and tapped Back to get back to the main list. Since the Apple UI (user interface/look) moves the current selection to the middle, this enabled us to now see General and select it. At this point it was simple to click Accessibility, Voice Over, and click the toggle to disable and confirm the action.

Finally our device was back to normal.




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