Reeding and saving mail attachments

Discovering that a mail has an attachment

In the mail app, as you swipe right or left through the inbox, VoiceOver will speak, the name of the sender, the subject of the mail, the start of the message and finally, if there are attachments, VoiceOver will state that the mail has attachments. Note that some mails containing embedded images can confuse the app into thinking that the mail has attached documents. In this case, you may find no actual attachments.

Opening and reading attachments

Double tap to open the mail. 

VoiceOver can speak the mail as usual, with a two finger swipe down. The attachments will be at the end of the mail. When an attachment is reached  you should  hear the name of an attachment, followed by its type and size, followed by the word "attachment" or "button". If you fail to stop VoiceOver in time, then it will read on past the attachment and will start reading the buttons at the bottom of the screen. If this happens, stop VoiceOver speech with a two finger tap and then swipe left to find the attachment. Some senders send attachments with long and complex names; please be patient 

The type of the attachment will often be one of the following, but you may encounter others:

doc or docx, for Microsoft Word documents;

pdf, for documents in Portable Document Format;

image, for pictures;

zip, for files compressed in a special, zip format.

iPhones and iPads can read Microsoft Word's doc and doc x files and pdf files but you may need the Winzip app on your device in order to handle zip attachments. I haven't checked recently if iOS or iPadOS can handle zip files. Note also that some pdf files may not be written accessibly and it will be impossible for VoiceOver to speak the contents of  an inaccessible pdf.

If your mail has, for example, a Word attachment, you may hear VoiceOver speak something like "meeting minutes March 2016 doc, button".  Double tap  and the attachment will be opened and displayed on your screen. It can then be read in the usual way by swiping down with two fingers and pausing and resuming with a two finger tap. Note that large attachments may not automatically download and VoiceOver will speak "tap to download". VoiceOver speaks this because that text is displayed for sighted users, but VoiceOver users need to double tap to download the attachment, in spite of what VoiceOver speaks. While the download is in progress, VoiceOver will probably repeat the name of the document every second or two. The download will be complete when VoiceOver becomes silent.  When the download is complete, the attachment is opened with another double tap. As soon as the attachment is open, it can be spoken continuously using a two finger swipe down. You can also swipe right or left to hear the document a chunk at a time. If the document contains a list, VoiceOver may speak "list start" and pause after reading the first item in the list; I think this feature is intended to allow you to interact with the list. You can swipe right through the list an item at a time; there may be a silent item as you swipe over the bullet at the start of each line in a bulleted list. When the end of the list is reached, continuous reading can be resumed with a two finger swipe down. If you are familiar with the rotor, you can also set the rotor to lines, words or characters and swipe up or down to progress a line, word or character at a time through the attachment.

When you have finished reeding the Word document, feel at top left of the screen for the "done, button" and double tap to return to mail.

Now, you did not need to read all the way through the mail to get to the attachment. You can skip through a long mail by swiping up repeatedly with three fingers and VoiceOver will tell you which page of the mail you are currently on. Long messages will also have a vertical scroll bar at the extreme right of the screen. Select this and swipe down with one finger to scroll more quickly through a long email. Once you have reached the final page, feel at the bottom of the screen for the row of buttons and then swipe left to find the attachments.

Saving an attachment

Reeding an attachment downloads the attachment temporarily to your phone or tablet.  If you wish to save an attachment permanently you may save the attachment to a location of your choice on your device, in iCloud or in any other cloud storage you use, for example, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive. Here's how:

After you have opened an attachment it can be saved using the Share button, which is at top right of the screen. Double tap the Share button to open the usual share menu. The share menu begins with a list of people and apps which can be skipped by touching near the bottom of the screen and then swiping up with three fingers to scroll to the next page. Touch near the bottom of the screen to locate a menu item and then swipe right or possibly left to find "save to files" and then double tap.

 Swipe right through the items on this screen and you will be told the name of the attachment, followed by the location to which it will be saved. The location may be remembered from a previous save to files. If the chosen location isn't where you want to save this attachment, continue swiping right and select a different location. If you need to create a new folder for this document, you will find a new folder button near the top of the screen. You can also rename the attachment by double tapping on its name button, which follows the item that states where the file wil be saved. When you have set the desired destination, locate the save button at top right and double tap.

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