Reeding and saving mail attachments with VoiceOver on iPhone or iPad

Discovering that a mail message 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 summary or start of the message and finally, if there are attachments, VoiceOver will state that the mail has attachments. Some mail messages 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 message. 

VoiceOver can speak the message as usual, with a two finger swipe down. The attachments will be at the end of the mail but that may be after a lot of footer information you don't need to hear. To save time, locate the Delete button at bottom left of the screen and then swipe left to jump directly to the attachments. When an attachment is reached  you should  hear its name, followed by its type and size, followed by the word "attachment" or "button". Some senders send attachments with long and meaningless names; please be patient if you want to hear the type of the attachment. 

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

pages for documents in the format used by Apple's Pages word processor;

doc or docx, for Microsoft Word documents;

pdf, for documents in Portable Document Format;

image, for pictures in various image formats;

iPhones and iPads can read Microsoft Word's doc and doc x files and pdf files but some PDF files may not be written accessibly and it will be impossible for VoiceOver to speak the contents of  an inaccessible PDF unless VoiceOver's Text Recognition feature is turned on in Settings / Accessibility / VoiceOver / VoiceOver Recognition. Using the basic attachment viewer VoiceOver doesn't always do a great job of reading even accessible PDF files but a more sophisticated viewer, the Preview app can sometimes do a better job but even Preview gives VoiceOver problems reading some tables in a meaningful order. Anyway, it's easy to try Preview; there is a Preview button in the centre of the toolbar at the bottom of the screen when you open a PDF attachment in Mail. If you use the Preview button, when you have finished reading with Preview you can return to Mail using the Return to Mail button at top left of the screen. 

If you didn't use Preview, then when you have finished reeding the attachment, use the close button at top right of the screen to return to Mail.

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 bottom right of the screen. Double tap the Share button to open the usual share sheet. The Save to Files option is in the third row of buttons below the attachment's name and type. The first row is people, the second is apps and the third row offers frequently used options such as Print. Save to Files may not appear until you use a More button. Double tap Save to Files.

Explore near top left of the screen and you may find a back button and, to its right, the name of the folder or service that is currently the destination of your attachment. This is normally set to the last location to which you saved a document. Use these buttons to navigate to the location where you want to save the file. There is a more button near top right which includes a New Foler option. When you have set the location  use the Save button at top right of the screen to complete the process.

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