Credit to the AppleVis team for putting together their VoiceOver and braille issues roundup for iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Testing this thoroughly and documenting problems while there's still time to address them is valuable work, and that list exists because a dedicated team of people did it carefully.
Reading the comments underneath, though, you'd think this release barely works. Having tested extensively myself — across devices, with a braille display, and alongside a second tester — that isn't the picture I'm seeing. What follows is my own pass through the same list, added alongside theirs rather than against it.
The audio change isn't a bug
The most prominent item is that VoiceOver audio has "significantly less bass," particularly at lower volumes, described as a regression. I don't read it that way. This looks like a deliberate trade-off: reducing bass in VoiceOver's speech specifically gives the DSP more headroom to push the internal speaker louder without distortion. Less low end at the earpiece means more room before the output turns to mush.
Two things the original piece left out: this only affects the internal speaker — AirPods, Bluetooth, and wired audio are all untouched — and it's VoiceOver's own speech that changed, not media playback.
Real issues, described a bit differently than they behave
One item is a genuine bug, just not quite shaped the way it's written up.
The per-voice equalizer is described as simply "not working." What I'm finding is more specific than that. The voice settings screen lets you adjust rate, pitch, and volume, with a separate EQ screen reachable from there. Make your adjustments in the EQ screen, back out to the main voice screen, and hit play to hear the demo line — Alex saying "most people recognize me by my voice." for example. It sounds noticeably affected, with the degree depending on how far the sliders were pushed, and it stays affected no matter how many times you play it back. But VoiceOver and Spoken Content themselves sound exactly as they did before, completely unchanged. The demo preview is the broken part, not the actual voice.
Confirmed, with the mechanics and workarounds that actually matter
The rest of these check out as described. Here's the detail that actually matters for each.
Safari's navigation buttons for moving between bookmarks and history don't function properly.
Continuous reading — started with a two-finger swipe down — also gets disrupted by an incoming banner notification, and it's reliably reproducible, not a one-off. Exactly what happens varies: with banner announcements for system notifications turned on in Verbosity settings, VoiceOver chokes right at that point; with them turned off, reading instead just stops at the end of the current element block; and in one deliberate test in Safari, it skipped an element outright instead. Doing another two-finger swipe down usually gets it going again, and oddly, sometimes a second notification coming in does the trick too. Reading manually through content, element by element, doesn't have this problem at all.
VoiceOver can skip the time announcement on wake, which means a full unlock just to check the status bar clock. The Phone app's call button has, at points, announced itself as "answer call" instead of the correct "call button" label.
Camera app focus loops past the first and last elements instead of stopping, and it's not even a clean loop. There's more sitting in the element order than you'd expect too, including "remove edit," "done," and a blank element. Swipe left at the boundary and you loop around; swipe right and it actually stops correctly at the zoom control. Apple's boundary logic, apparently, has a favorite direction.
Notification Center's "clear all" function is affected, and the mechanics are specific. Navigate down to the notification heading, and VoiceOver presents a "Clear" button. Swiping up on it is supposed to reveal "Clear All" as an alternate action — that gesture does nothing here. The workaround: triple-tap the button, or double-tap and hold it, and an actual "Clear All" button appears, which you then double-tap to perform.
Combo box menus opening automatically the moment focus leaves a text field is one of the more disruptive items on the list. If you already know where it is, avoid touching that area to avoid bringing it up.
Notification access on the Lock Screen is unreliable regardless of how many notifications you've got queued up — flicking through them will either get stuck or bump focus onto whatever's sitting below, like widgets or buttons. The fix is a three-finger swipe up to scroll the screen, bringing more of what's below into view; getting through the full list means repeating that swipe every time you reach the end of what's currently on screen. It's not unique to the Lock Screen either — I've run into the same need-to-manually-scroll pattern in Finch's quests screen too, along with a few other apps. iOS 26 didn't have this problem, so it's not some old VoiceOver habit resurfacing — it's a new pattern in iOS 27, just wearing a different costume depending on which app it turns up in.
Diagnostics Mode in the Recovery Menu remains inaccessible; putting the device into DFU mode and restoring from a computer is the more reliable route if you need it. The duplicate delete action in the Siri conversations rotor is present too, though harmless — both options complete the delete correctly, it's simply doubled up for no clear reason.
Copy Speech including unwanted semantic markup is a real issue — words like "button" or "heading" ending up mixed into the copied text alongside the actual content — and one I want more time with before saying anything more definitive. I've also seen it cut a long piece of text off partway through when copying; whether that one's still happening is something I haven't nailed down yet either.
Issues I couldn't reproduce
A few items on the list didn't occur during my own testing. The custom pronunciation dictionary — tested with a straightforward substitution on my partner's device — worked exactly as expected, no muss, no fuss, no sign of being "often not obeyed." The Safari-plus-external-audio-device speech dropout didn't occur once across AirPods, Bluetooth, and wired audio over extensive testing. Sound Curtain and Touch Curtain, tested alongside a braille display, also appeared to behave — though that testing was lighter than the rest, so read this as "didn't happen to me" rather than a clean bill of health.
Not enough information to confirm
Being upfront about the gaps here, since I can't claim to have tested everything: whether VoiceOver mispronounces the time specifically at the top of the hour under 24-hour format isn't something I was watching closely enough to confirm or rule out. Custom gesture replacement not overwriting existing commands isn't a feature I use, so I have no data there. The "various Lock Screen inconsistencies" line in the original piece is vague enough that it's difficult to respond to directly — if it refers to focus jumping after tapping "show notifications," that has occurred occasionally, but there isn't enough detail to confirm that's what's meant.
An issue not on their list
Using the rotor's item description option on an image in Messages either fails or only captures part of the image, but only once you've tapped the image open to view it full screen — that's the specific point where it falls short, not while it's just sitting in the thread. Screen description works reliably as an alternative there instead, proof that sometimes the backup plan outperforms the headliner. This wasn't included in the original roundup, but it's worth knowing if you rely on image descriptions in Messages.
What's actually improved
The original piece is accurate on this front, and credit where it's due. VoiceOver focus stability has genuinely improved with this release. Keyboard sounds now play alongside VoiceOver regardless of ducking settings. App Switcher focus behaves correctly now. Eloquence's volume now matches the other voices instead of playing quieter. Lock Screen no longer locking while VoiceOver reads a notification checks out too, confirmed firsthand.
Conclusion
Some of what's on that list is a genuine problem worth Apple's attention, and flagging it was the right call. But a good chunk of what makes that list look alarming turns out to be either not reproducible, described a bit differently than it actually plays out, something you can work around in the meantime, or not a bug in the first place. The release has real bruises. It isn't rotten — and most of the spots people are worried about just need a slightly different bite.