Day 77

Announce off-screen updates with notifications

3 Aug 2022

It can help to alert the user of something that happened, in a part of the screen that is not currently on focus, and that is not important enough to disrupt the user by moving VoiceOver’s focus to a different place.

It can be useful to announce certain messages like errors or long running tasks that have finished (i.e. a download that finished) or with custom notifications and snack bars.

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You may also find interesting...

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.

accessibilitySpeechSpellOut asks VoiceOver to speak the sequence of characters. Can be useful for things like promo/reference/authentication codes, phone numbers... it makes more sense to announce each character rather than words and big numbers. Example code in the image: ```swift let codeLabel = UILabel() let attributedLabel = NSAttributedString( string: "BAC1234567D", attributes: [.accessibilitySpeechSpellOut: true] ) title.accessibilityAttributedLabel = attributedLabel ```

Images that convey important information should have the .image accessibility trait and provide an alternative text in the accessibility label. "Image" will be added to VoiceOver's utterance and the user will be able to use Image Explorer. Image Explorer is fairly new, introduced just a couple years ago. But if you were appropriately configuring the image trait, users suddenly got this new functionality for free. Isn't that awesome? With VoiceOver on, open Image Explorer by swiping up in an image and double tapping. It lets users find people (with a basic description and positioning in the photo), objects or text in images, using on-device intelligence. It is very cool!


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