[RNMobile] Fix dictation regression on iOS

[SiobhyB]

Proposed fix for wordpress-mobile/gutenberg-mobile#5165

• Gutenberg Mobile: Fix dictation regression on iOS wordpress-mobile/gutenberg-mobile#5561
• WordPress iOS: [DO NOT MERGE] Fix dictation regression on iOS wordpress-mobile/WordPress-iOS#20335

What?

The changes in this PR fixes an issue with dictation not working as expected on devices running iOS 16 or later. To achieve this, an old dictation-related hack has been removed for later iOS version.

Why?

The dictation hack stopped being necessary following improvements made to dictation in iOS 16‌.

Now, with devices that are running iOS 16 or later, text added with iOS dictation is lost when tapping into the editor or typing while the dictation is still recording. This causes unexpected content loss, and could be viewed as an accessibility issue for those who rely on dictation to use the editor.

How?

The hack that was first introduced in wordpress-mobile/gutenberg-mobile#610 has been confined to only run for older versions of iOS 16.

It's necessary to keep this in place for older versions. ⤵️

If we remove the hack for older versions, an obj symbol is generated when dictating, as reported in wordpress-mobile/gutenberg-mobile#1969. Screenshot taken from an iPhone 6s (iOS 15.5) emulator with the hack removed:

You can refer to the comment section of wordpress-mobile/gutenberg-mobile#5165 for further context on how this solution came about.

Testing Instructions

Note
There are times where capitalisation is lost while dictating. This will be reported in a separate GitHub issue.

An installable build is available at wordpress-mobile/WordPress-iOS#20335 for testing on a physical device.

The following steps need to be tested with both iOS 16 or later and an earlier version of iOS:

1. Navigate to My Site → Posts and create a new post.
2. Activate the iOS dictation feature and dictate some text.
3. Notice the text added to the editor.
4. Tap another block on the editor or begin typing onto the keyboard to confirm there is no content loss.
5. Experiment with adding various text and attempting to break dictation.

It would also be helpful to go through the testing steps in the following PRs, where the hacks were originally introduced, to ensure there are no similar issues now they've been removed:

• Fix dictation issue on iOS wordpress-mobile/gutenberg-mobile#610
• RNAztec iOS: Fix removing content after dictation wordpress-mobile/gutenberg-mobile#700
• [iOS] Fix [Obj] character after dictation wordpress-mobile/gutenberg-mobile#1969

Screenshots or screencast

Screen.Recording.2023-03-15.at.20.29.08.mov

[github-actions]

Flaky tests detected in 274ecde17bce0b1a894698f785c7639b622a96cb.
Some tests passed with failed attempts. The failures may not be related to this commit but are still reported for visibility. See the documentation for more information.

🔍 Workflow run URL: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/actions/runs/4429990923
📝 Reported issues:

• [Flaky Test] should show the currently selected template's title and description #48270 in specs/site-editor/settings-sidebar.test.js

[SiobhyB]

Note, I had originally attempted to call super.insertDictationResult(), so that we could rely on the default function, but this caused a crash.

[SiobhyB]

It's necessary to keep this in place for older version, as without it an obj icon is added along with dictated text.

Screenshot taken from an iPhone 6s (iOS 15.5) emulator with the hack removed:

[derekblank]

Thanks for addressing this @SiobhyB! I was able to test dictation successfully following the testing steps on this PR, and the other PRs mentioned, and did not note any content loss.

I did note the issue where multiline dictations do not expand the text input for each line until the user taps out of the block, as mentioned and described in your comment here, and also this video example from the same thread. I agree that your ideas to use isInsertingDictationResult or textViewDidChange would be a good approach to leverage in a later PR. Also, I did not run into the capitalization issue mentioned in that comment. 👍

LGTM! 🚀

[SiobhyB]

Thank you so much @derekblank! 🙌

I did note the issue where multiline dictations do not expand the text input for each line until the user taps out of the block

I'll create a separate GitHub issue for this so we don't lose track and it can be tackled in later PRs, as you suggested 🙇‍♀️