CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iphoneiosuikitvoiceover
John Lane
John Lane

Reputation: 1132

iOS determine if VoiceOver is still talking

Is there a way to determine whether VoiceOver is currently announcing and when it stops. I've tried UIAccessibilityVoiceOverStatusChanged but my understanding is that this is only if you switch VoiceOver on or off. Any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks.

Upvotes: 9

Views: 2582

Answers (3)

Charles LaPierre
Charles LaPierre

Reputation: 11

We use otherAudioIsPlaying, the problem is some app's running in the background like some pedometer monitors etc. turn on the audio it seems and never release it so even though nothing is actually being spoken or played otherAudioIsPlaying always returns 1 until you remove the other application from the background. So now not only can you not play music but you have no idea that another application in the background will mess up this test. Apple really needs to put in an API to determine if Voice Over is currently speaking or not.

Upvotes: 1

Robert
Robert

Reputation: 1

You could use the audio session's "OtherAudioIsPlaying" property to check if another system process is using the audio hardware at the moment. It should be "true" if VoiceOver is speaking and "false" if not.

Actually this might not work properly if the user is playing music in the background. But most users running VoiceOver will usually not have any other audio enabled permanently, since it makes it harder to understand what VoiceOver is saying.

Here is an example for usage:

UInt32 otherAudioIsPlaying;
UInt32 propertySize = sizeof(otherAudioIsPlaying);

AudioSessionGetProperty(kAudioSessionProperty_OtherAudioIsPlaying,&propertySize, &otherAudioIsPlaying);

if(otherAudioIsPlaying) {
    // other application is generating sound output (including VoiceOver)
    // but might also be any other app (like iPod App)
}

Upvotes: 0

epetousis
epetousis

Reputation: 454

These are all the Accessibility booleans that I found in the documentation:

UIAccessibilityPostNotification
UIAccessibilityIsVoiceOverRunning
UIAccessibilityIsMonoAudioEnabled
UIAccessibilityIsClosedCaptioningEnabled
UIAccessibilityRegisterGestureConflictWithZoom

I don't think that there are any booleans to do what you are talking about.

Upvotes: 0

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