Day 76

Move VoiceOver focus when UI expands

2 Aug 2022

Sometimes, you change your app's UI to offer more options as a result of a user's action. And in such cases, it might be a good idea to move VoiceOver's focus to these new options. We can do that by sending a layout changed notification.

Two examples from Apple where they seem to post a layout changed notification to UIAccessibility to move VoiceOver's focus to new options. First one is the reminders app. When double tapping the Date & Time button, there is a new bar that appears on top of it with some predefined date options, and the focus moves to the first option in the bar that appeared. The second is the camera app. At the top of the screen there is a camera controls button that is collapsed by default. If you expand it, some new options appear further down the screen, right after the zoom options, and VoiceOver focus will move to the first one of the new camera controls presented.

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Day 9

IPA for homographs and your app name

accessibilitySpeechIPANotation is sometimes handy in English where a word is spelled the same but pronounced differently depending of the context. Some examples are: live, read... Or you may want to correct how VoiceOver pronounces your app's name! Example code in the image: ```swift let liveNewsChannelView = UIView() let attributedLabel = NSMutableAttributedString(string: "24 hour news channel. ") attributedLabel.append(NSAttributedString(string: "Live",attributes: [.accessibilitySpeechIPANotation: "laɪv"])) liveNewsChannelView.accessibilityAttributedLabel = attributedLabel ```

Day 65

Custom actions for hidden swipe gestures

Custom actions are also great for actions that are executed with a gesture that is overridden by VoiceOver. Think of the unread, flag and archive hidden options that you can make visible by swiping left/right on a message row in the Mail app.

VoiceOver iOS

Day 75

Move VoiceOver focus on modal present

Even when setting a view as modal for accessibility, you may notice that VoiceOver's focus stays in the same place, instead of moving to the presented view. You can post a screen changed notification and pass the view that should get the focus.

VoiceOver iOS

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