Day 5

Label image-only buttons for VoiceOver

23 May 2022

Believe it or not, one of the most common accessibility pitfalls I see in iOS apps, is forgetting to configure a suitable accessibility label for buttons with just an image (no title), resulting in VoiceOver saying just: "button".

Why for buttons with just an image? If it has a title, the accessibility label gets inferred from it. So here's one that should be very easy for you to find and fix in your app. No more apps that just say: button, button, button, button...!

If you are looking for the best explanation on what makes, not good, but great accessibility labels, I really recommend “Writing Great Accessibility Labels” by @jordyn2493 at WWDC. The difference between someone using/loving/deleting your app. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/254/

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Day 59

Please don't use accessibility labels as UI test IDs

Please, don't use accessibility labels as ids for your UI tests. It can completely ruin the experience for VoiceOver users. There is actually an accessibility identifier property that you can use instead to uniquely identify your UI elements.

Day 13

Speak punctuation with accessibilitySpeechPunctuation

With the attribute accessibilitySpeechPunctuation, you can ask VoiceOver to speak any punctuation marks in your attributed accessibility label, if that is what you want. Good for code snippets?

VoiceOver accessibilityLabel accessibilitySpeechPunctuation iOS

Day 37

selected trait announces before the label

The .selected accessibility trait indicates when an element has been selected. You’ll notice that VoiceOver announces “selected” before the accessibility label. You can find that in the system for the selected tab in the tab bar, for example.

VoiceOver accessibilityLabel iOS isSelected

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