Okay, folks, how do y’all use TikTok with VoiceOver? Trying to figure it out but all I’ve discovered thus far has been (metaphorical) pain and suffering. Any assistance appreciated.
PS: is #accessibility given any sort of priority over there? If so, any leads on people to contact would be great.
#Blind #BlindMasto #BlindMastodon #BlindFedi @mastoblind @main
@NoahCarver @mastoblind @main It’s pretty easy to use what exactly are you having trouble with or is it everything in general?
@BlindAllDay @mastoblind @main It’s pretty much everything in general. I have no vision to work with, so turning off VoiceOVer and just poking around is not at the top of my list of things to do. Am hearing that’s pretty much the only option though.
@NoahCarver @mastoblind @main TikTok is quite accessible overall, with nearly everything labeled. If you turn off VoiceOver, you can navigate to the next and previous videos and control playback (stop and play) easier. With VoiceOver on, you can only go to the next video and control playback; I haven’t found a way to go to a previous video with VoiceOver on. However, all these buttons are labeled and accessible. The For You page and the Following page are easy to use and are what most people do on TikTok. uploading video’s is not to hard as well.
@NoahCarver @mastoblind @main It sort of sometimes works in a desktop browser.
@fastfinge @main Interesting. Last time I tried it, it did not play nicely. Down arrowing through the page would cause it to autoplay more and more videos, so I could only look at a tiny subset of the page without it jumping to a new vid on me.
@NoahCarver @mastoblind @main I just started using it last week so there may very well be other things I may not be aware of, the app is kind of garbage but here’s some things I found out about to make it easier. Firstly in the accessibility settings there’s an option to display some additional buttons if VoiceOver is on, you obviously want that turned on which it already started out being for me. That adds a bunch of buttons running down the right middle of the screen to like, follow, read comments and so on, as well as previous and next buttons at the top as an alternative to manual scrolling. By far the biggest annoyance to be aware of is that for some reason with VoiceOver on when you touch some parts of the screen or do some actions that cause a screen change like following someone or opening the sharing screen, it’ll scroll you back to the top of your feed unless you’re holding your finger down to prevent the focus from moving. This is why so many people prefer to scroll with VoiceOver on, which isn’t as bad as it sounds because the video takes up nearly the whole screen. With VO off, single tapping the video pauses, while double-tapping likes it which is accompanied by a haptic. Then if you want to do anything else you turn on VO then immediately start touching the screen where the buttons are so it doesn’t scroll you to the top. For the website, which in some ways is better, there are 2 decent ways to browse the feed. One is just going by graphic which will automatically play the video and the buttons to like and so on will be immediately below, or an even better way is to open the comments view from any video, find the dialog that pops up and then scroll with either down/up or the next and previous buttons. The advantage to doing it this way is you can also rewind and fast forward the video with right/left arrows and you have immediate access to comments.
Hope this helps. I got a lot of this from @talon who’s been using it for a lot longer than me.
@NoahCarver @jdking92 @mastoblind @main Here’s how to use TikTok with voiceover on: scrolling through videos is done by flicking three fingers up to go to the next video and three fingers down to go to the previous video. You can see how many likes does a video have and like a video as well as check how many comments does the video have and read them and follow the uploader of the video by double tapping the icons on the right side of the screen. Here’s how to use TikTok with voiceover turned off: Scrolling through videos is done with flicking one finger up to go to the next video and one finger down to go to the previous video. If you want to pause a video that is currently playing, tap once on the middle of the screen to pause it and tap once again to unpause it. If you want to Scroll through a video, flick your finger left and right at the bottom of your screen you could say that it’s the area above the home button. You might not be able to do it at first, but it’ll be easier in time. If you want to fast forward through a video, as in, speed it up tap and hold the left side of your screen and flick up. Keep holding to continue fast forwarding otherwise, release to stop. Double tap on the screen with one finger to like a video. Swipe left with one finger to go to the uploader’s profile. If you want to go back to where you were, tap once on the upper left edge of the screen. I hope this helps.
@Ryok141 @jdking92 @mastoblind @main This is an incredibly detailed and excellent write-up. Thank you so much. This really should be archived somewhere for easier visibility.
@NoahCarver @jdking92 @mastoblind @main You’re welcome! I’m glad it helped. I’m sure @DavidGoldfield could help with that. Maybe he’ll be able to distribute it throughout his tech-vi list.
