Day 63

Group cells for faster VoiceOver navigation

20 Jul 2022

Sometimes you want to prioritise ease of navigation, and that's when configuring isAccessibilityElement to true on a container view makes sense. This is especially true in table/collection views and with complex cells with lots of elements.

Two devices with a Twitter timeline. One of them exemplifies how it would work with VoiceOver if each one of the tweets had the isAccessibilityElement property configured to false. VoiceOver would be able to focus on: name, handle, date, text, options button, comments button, retweet button, like button, share button, etc. Going from one tweet to the next one would easily take 11 swipes to the right. On the second one, each one of the tweets has the isAccessibilityElement configured to true, so a single swipe to the right is enough to get from one tweet to the next one.

Take the example from a tweet (from Day 62's tweet). If the tweet has 9 accessible elements, you'd need 9 swipes to the right to go to the next tweet in the list. But ideally, I single swipe should be enough.

https://x.com/dadederk/status/1549417799746994177

On the other hand, for the detail screen for a single tweet, you want to optimise for ease of access to each one of the elements, instead of navigation. In that case it would be better for the tweet view not to be an accessibility element.

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Day 73

isAccessibilityElement vs accessibilityElementsHidden

What is the difference between isAccessibilityElement and accessibilityElementsHidden? The first one makes the view not accessible, but its subviews can still be accessible. The second one hides the view and all its subviews from assistive tech.

Day 204

isAccessibilityElement and nested controls

If a view has isAccessibilityElement to true, assistive tech won't look for any of its subviews. That means that if there are any buttons inside, they won't be accessible. You can add custom actions to that element though.

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Day 44

Mark decorative images as non-accessible

If an image does not convey additional information, maybe it's just used to make the UI look more attractive, it makes sense for VoiceOver to skip it. UIKit: set isAccessibilityElement to false. SwiftUI: create a decorative image explicitly.

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