Day 59

Please don't use accessibility labels as UI test IDs

16 Jul 2022

VoiceOver accessibility identifier accessibilityIdentifier accessibilityLabel iOS

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.

An app for booking flights has used the accessibility label property to uniquely identify elements, presumably for finding those elements on their UI tests. That means that VoiceOver will start reading something like “Plan underscore trip underscore ban underscore airport underscore description underscore label. Plan underscore trip underscore ban underscore origin underscore airport underscore gps underscore icon. Plan underscore trip underscore btn underscore airport underscore title underscore label”, instead of a more understandable sequence of labels, something like “From. London Gatwick”.

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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 175

Input labels help keyboard users too

Accessibility Labels are not just for VoiceOver, and Accessibility User Input Labels are not just for Voice Control. The latter will also help Full Keyboard Access users to find elements on the screen by different names. Good API design!

Full Keyboard Access Voice Control VoiceOver accessibilityLabel accessibilityUserInputLabels iOS

Day 13

Speak punctuation with accessibilitySpeechPunctuation

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?

VoiceOver accessibilityLabel accessibilitySpeechPunctuation iOS

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