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Fixu86

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 11, 2015
53
6
Switzerland
With watchOS 3 a new feature came to the watch, called Taptic Time. Apple describes it as following in the AW user guide:

Feel the time in wrist taps
Open the Apple Watch app on iPhone, tap My Watch, go to General > Accessibility > VoiceOver, then tap Taptic Time. Turn on Enable Taptic Time, then tap a Taptic Style. To test a style, tap Preview.

Has any one tested it? On my watch it doesn't work, it doesn't matter if VoiceOver is enabled or not - it still doesn't tell me the time via taptic feedback.
Any suggestions?


Cheers
 

KrisLord

macrumors 68000
Sep 12, 2008
1,741
1,873
Northumberland, UK
Not tired it until now. Preview demos it on your phone.

On the watch I can only get it to work with voiceover enabled, which kind of defeats the point for partially sighted people. Will experiment more tomorrow, voiceover just woke up my wife! Oops:)
 

Fixu86

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 11, 2015
53
6
Switzerland
Preview on the iPhone just works fine.
Where did you double tap your watch? When I double tap the watch, the first tap will activate the screen and the second tap opens an app like weather or calender (I've the Modular watchface)
 

KrisLord

macrumors 68000
Sep 12, 2008
1,741
1,873
Northumberland, UK
I tried it again this morning and I can't even replicate what I did last night!

Last night I enabled voiceover on the watch app.... that didn't sync immediately so I enabled it in on the watch itself. That enabled both voiceover and Taptic time. I just raised my wrist and tapped.

This morning no matter what I tried I just got voiceover.

I then remembered hat last night I had "wake screen on wrist raise" disabled. Switching that off and the behaviour returns to what it was last night. It still read the time but does use haptic feedback too. It seems to only read it when you first raise and tap.
 

Fixu86

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 11, 2015
53
6
Switzerland
Thank you KrisLord, unfortunately almost the same here.
Seems like as VoiceOver has to be active, wrist raise on/off didn't took any impact on the taptic time feedback.
In my opinion this is a bug, the taptic time feedback should be a silent way to check the current time - there for is a spoken current time, what VoiceOver will do, very unwanted.
 

KrisLord

macrumors 68000
Sep 12, 2008
1,741
1,873
Northumberland, UK
Thank you KrisLord, unfortunately almost the same here.
Seems like as VoiceOver has to be active, wrist raise on/off didn't took any impact on the taptic time feedback.
In my opinion this is a bug, the taptic time feedback should be a silent way to check the current time - there for is a spoken current time, what VoiceOver will do, very unwanted.

I'm not a real developer but my account is registered as a dev (I keep starting to learn to code but keep getting interrupted) so I've submitted a bug for this as it's annoyed me. Given Apple are great at accessibility, this seems rather odd.

I also found this app which might be useful:

TimeBuzz by Marco Miltenburg
https://appsto.re/gb/Hzfn7.i
 

Fixu86

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 11, 2015
53
6
Switzerland
Thank you, once again!
Hopefuly Apple will fix this in an upcoming watchOS.
The 3rd party app you mentioned does intend to do the same thing, but I think its quite hard to open the complication without looking on your AW. If I need to look on the AW to open the app, its sensless
 
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