Day 11

Emphasize labels with accessibilitySpeechPitch

29 May 2022

VoiceOver accessibilitySpeechPitch iOS speechPitch

accessibilitySpeechPitch lets you emphasise something changing VoiceOver's pitch. The value goes from 0.0 to 2.0. The default is 1.0. Twitter could change pitch to read hashtags, for example, avoiding repetition but still signalling they're there.

Example shows how you can specify changing the pitch for a portion of an attributed accessibility label, using the accessibilitySpeechPitch attribute, for hashtags on a tweet. By default VoiceOver would read something like “Writing about developing accessible hashtag iOS apps in hashtag 365 days iOS Accessibility hashtag accessibility hashtag a 11 y”. There’s lots of repetition of the word hashtag. But it could be changed so it says “Writing about developing accessible iOS apps in 365 days iOS Accessibility accessibility a 11 y” where iOS, 365 days iOS accessibility, accessibility and a 11 y, is read with a lower pitch of 0.7.

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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 221

Screen Curtain and VoiceOver shortcuts

It is useful to know these VoiceOver gestures to activate/deactivate Screen Curtain, pause/resume VoiceOver, easily simulate a long press for opening context menus, or quickly move the cursor to the screen's first or last elements.

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Day 86

Add context with accessibilityContainerType

Have you noticed that the first time you select an element on Apple Podcast's mini player, VoiceOver says "Mini player", and then, it describes the selected element? It gives the user more context on what "feature" those elements belong to. This can be achieved in UIKit by configuring the accessibility container type of the mini player with .semanticGroup and giving it an accessibility label, in this case: "Mini player". https://developer.apple.com/documentation/objectivec/nsobject-swift.class/accessibilitycontainertype https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiaccessibilitycontainertype/semanticgroup

VoiceOver iOS isSelected

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