Day 67

Custom actions work in Switch Control

24 Jul 2022

Custom actions work as great on Switch Control as they do in VoiceOver. It makes navigation much, much, faster and you’ll be able to find all those custom actions in the Switch Control menu.

Twitter app is open. Switch Control is on and the cursor is on top of the first tweet in the timeline. Switch Control's menu is being shown and in there you can find the main actions you'd expect to perform on a tweet: reply, retweet, like or share, among others. Making navigation and interaction much faster than if we were not grouping tweets as single accessibility elements and moving actions to custom actions.

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You may also find interesting...

When building custom components, or if not relying on UIControl's attributes to configure state, it can be easy to forget to specify the right accessibility traits. These are indispensable for a good experience with VoiceOver, Switch Control...

Custom actions work with VoiceOver, Switch Control and Full Keyboard Access. They also do for Voice Control. You can say "Show actions for <item name/number>", and an action sheet with all options, numbered, will be presented to the user. For some use-cases, Voice Control users might not feel it is a big win. Navigation is not as big of an issue, and interacting with custom actions might be a bit trickier than with "exposed" buttons. But lots of times seems a fair compromise.

Custom actions work well with VoiceOver and Switch Control. It is also a way of speeding up navigation, and grouping all actions available for an item in a single place, with Full Keyboard Access. Focus an item and use the shortcut Tab (⇥) + Z.


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