TIFU by mistaking VoiceOver on my iPhone for the screenreading function and had to factory reset my phone

So, I write a fair amount of fanfiction, and one thing I often do when I’m editing a chapter before posting it is use my iPhone’s built-in screenreader to read the text aloud to me. It helps me catch errors my eyes might be prone to gloss over. I’ve done this for like a year, but a few months back the screenreader started having some issues where it would stop after a couple of sentences, so I hadn’t used it in a while.

This morning, I decided to listen to the chapter I’m currently editing while I got ready for work, but it started doing the thing where it would only read a couple of sentences and then stop. I went into the accessibility settings, thinking that maybe when I got a new phone a few months back, something had been turned off. I saw a feature called VoiceOver and, though I didn’t think that was what I had used before, thought I’d least try turning it on — worst-case scenario, I could just turn it back off.

VoiceOver is a feature that reads everything on the screen apparently, including reading text on buttons. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it back off since every time I hit the VoiceOver option, it would just read the button. I ended up locking my phone, and in order to unlock it, it wanted a passcode (my fingerprint wouldn’t work). But it kept rejecting my passcode — the same dang passcode I have used for like ten years. My phone ended up locked for five minutes. And then things got worse.

I guess there’s something called a screen curtain that is a part of this VoiceOver feature? All I know is that my screen went black and wouldn’t turn back on. I was worried because last night, my phone had given me a warning when I tried to charge it that there was moisture in the charging port, and even though I had unplugged it until whatever moisture was gone, I thought maybe something had leached into some important part and fried it. But it would still vibrate and make some system sounds when I pushed buttons, so it wasn’t totally dead.

I try looking up solutions, but most of what I see involves activating Siri to have the phone turn off VoiceOver. I don’t use Siri. Like, I have that function turned off on my phone, so I know that isn’t an option

I decide to contact Apple support to see if I need to go to an Apple store or something. I jump on my MacBook (yes, I went all-in on Apple like a decade ago and have regretted it for years) and pull up their website to try to access the support chat, only to be reminded that my account is locked. I cannot remember how this happened, and it functionally has done very little to affect my life — my payments to Apple still go through, my phone has worked, I still have music, etc. but my account is locked and has been for months.

I can’t access support chat with a locked account. I briefly consider trying to activate my old phone for the day just so I can, like, call emergency services if I’m in an accident or allow my family to get ahold of me, but realize if my Apple account is locked, I might not be able to sign in on the phone anyway. I go through the process of unlocking it. They send an unlock pop thing to my MacBook, but I close out of it on accident and am not able to get it to reappear. They want to send an unlock code to my phone. The one with the black screen. I decide to give it a try, hoping it’ll come through on iMessage. No dice. I try to have them send it the only mobile number I have memorized aside from my own — my mom’s phone, which only confuses her since I’m not actually able to call or text her to explain what the heck is going on.

I leave the MacBook long enough for it to fall asleep and when it wakes up, the popup to unlock my account is back. I’m able to do so finally by entering in my MacBook password, so I can finally use the Apple support chat.

Support chat has me do a few things — a soft reset, which allows my screen to turn on for half a second — long enough for me to see that my phone is still locked for “five minutes” — an update, which I have to do by plugging my phone into my MacBook, and finally a full restore. I figure it won’t be too big of a problem, since I’m pretty sure I have a setting that periodically backs up my phone.

Apparently I turned that off, because my last back-up was made in January of this year. Thankfully, my photos and writing are all stored using cloud-based services, but every text I sent and received to Android users in the past six months is gone, and I was like an hour late to work when I had planned on going in early.

And, as much as I want to get into the insane time I had logging into my Gmail account because of this reset, that is less about me effing up and more about Google’s two-factor authentication becoming more and more insane as time goes on. Like, I can get into it, I guess, but it’ll mainly be me complaining.

Tl;dr: turning on VoiceOver on my iPhone led to a series of events that ended in me having to restore my phone to its factory settings, and since I hadn’t backed it up since January, I lost six months of texts and who-knows-what-else.