Day 45

startsMediaSession avoids label repetition

2 Jul 2022

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.

An app for learning Dutch has an audio clip to play how you would say Hi. When the play button is focused with VoiceOver, it says: “Play, button”. If you double tap the play button, VoiceOver will say: “Play” at the same time that the audio clip plays, saying: “Hoi!”. If you add the starts media session accessibility trait, VoiceOver won’t say anything back when double tapping the button, and you’ll just hear the audio clip saying: “Hoi!”.

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It is possible to embed icons within text using NSTextAttachment and NSAttributedString. If you do, please remember to override the accessibility label, otherwise VoiceOver will announce it as "Attachment.png File". Example code in the image: ```swift let magnifyingGlassIcon = UIImage(systemName: "magnifyingglass")! let searchButton = UIButton() let searchTutorialLabel = UILabel() searchButton.accessibilityLabel = "search" let textAttachment = NSTextAttachment(image: magnifyingGlassIcon) let string = "Select the button to find elements in the list" let attributedString = NSMutableAttributedString(string: string) let attributedStringIcon = NSAttributedString(attachment: textAttachment) let iconPlaceholderRange = attributedString.string.range(of: "")! let iconRange = NSRange(iconPlaceholderRange, in: attributedString.string) attributedString.replaceCharacters(in: iconRange, with: attributedStringIcon) searchTutorialLabel.attributedText = attributedString searchTutorialLabel.accessibilityLabel = string.replacingCharacters(in: iconPlaceholderRange, with: searchButton.accessibilityLabel!) ```

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.

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.


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