Day 37

selected trait announces before the label

24 Jun 2022

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.

The accessibility shortcut setting is open. There is a list of options. VoiceOver, Switch Control and Voice Control have a check symbol to the left. Zoom has not. Illustration shows how VoiceOver will announce the ones with the check as selected, before the accessibility label.

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You may also find interesting...

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?

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!

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


Content © Daniel Devesa Derksen-Staats on Accessibility up to 11! is licensed under CC BY 4.0. License details