Day 6

Attributed accessibility labels are a thing

24 May 2022

Attributed accessibility labels are a thing! They'll let you specify (for the whole accessibility label or a portion of it) VoiceOver's language, to read punctuation marks, spell it out, correct the pronunciation, or even change the pitch.

@RobRWAPP has a very detailed blog post explaining each one of these attributes: https://mobilea11y.com/blog/attributed-accessibility-labels/

And here's Apple's official documentation for them: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/speech-attributes-for-attributed-strings

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Day 45

startsMediaSession avoids label repetition

When interacting with a button with VoiceOver, the accessibility label is repeated to the user. If you are playing some audio, it could be difficult to listen to it properly. To avoid that, you can add the .startsMediaSession accessibility trait.

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 43

image trait unlocks Image Explorer

Images that convey important information should have the .image accessibility trait and provide an alternative text in the accessibility label. "Image" will be added to VoiceOver's utterance and the user will be able to use Image Explorer. Image Explorer is fairly new, introduced just a couple years ago. But if you were appropriately configuring the image trait, users suddenly got this new functionality for free. Isn't that awesome? With VoiceOver on, open Image Explorer by swiping up in an image and double tapping. It lets users find people (with a basic description and positioning in the photo), objects or text in images, using on-device intelligence. It is very cool!

VoiceOver accessibilityLabel iOS

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