Day 55

Include icon state in labels and values

12 Jul 2022

When thinking about accessibility labels and values, it is easy to miss adding information or state that are represented by little visual cues and icons: a checkmark indicating something has been played, a down arrow indicating a downward trend...

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Day 56

Override labels for NSTextAttachment icons

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!) ```

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.

VoiceOver accessibility identifier accessibilityIdentifier accessibilityLabel iOS

Day 198

Writing better accessibility labels

Some recommendations for improving your accessibility labels: don't add the element type, avoid redundancy and verbosity, localize... @MobileA11y has an excellent blog post on it: https://mobilea11y.com/blog/writing-great-labels/ @jordyn2493 has a great video too: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/254/

accessibilityLabel iOS

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