Day 56

13 Jul 2022

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".

If you assign an attributed string to the attributed text property in a label, and the attributed string contains an nstextattachment that is an image, you need to override the accessibility label of the label. In the example, if you don't do it, VoiceOver would say:

Example code in the image:

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!)

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