Day 91

Respond when VoiceOver turns on or off

17 Aug 2022

You can check if VoiceOver is running but you can also get a notification to act in case that changes, while the user is using your app. As seen before, you rarely want to do significant changes in the experience when VoiceOver is on.

Netflix app is open and showing the categories menu. If you have accessibility shortcuts on, you can triple click the side button on your device to show the accessibility shortcuts menu. If you select VoiceOver, the Audio Description synthetic genre is now on top of the list. This can be achieved by listening to the VoiceOver status did change notification and do the necessary changes. The code in this illustration is borrowed from the talk

But this use-case presented by @djembe from @NetflixEng at @appbuildersch is an excellent example of inclusive design. When VoiceOver is on, they bump the Audio Described "genre" to the top of the list. Brilliant!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=981&v=NQjBcZuts&feature=youtu.be

These series of tweets tend to be fairly technical but as John says, a big part of creating great accessible user experiences is about "being kind", about caring about your users and customers to come up with great features like this one.

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Day 47
summaryElement announces on app launch
The .summaryElement accessibility trait causes VoiceOver to announce that element when the app starts. The element won't get the focus though, and the order is not affected. A candidate for this trait could be the rings info in the Activity app.
VoiceOver iOS isSummaryElement

Day 17
Detect when VoiceOver is running
You can check if some features, like VoiceOver, are on. Experiences should not diverge too much. It could be used to avoid auto-hiding UI elements. iOS probably checks this to show search fields by default, without having to pull them down. From the documentation: isVoiceOverRunning: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiaccessibility/isvoiceoverrunning
VoiceOver iOS

Day 36
updatesFrequently for live changing content
If you want to update the VoiceOver user frequently about how a component is changing, when focused, you can use the .updatesFrequently accessibility trait. A downloading progress bar, a stock value, or a timer, are some examples.
VoiceOver iOS updatesFrequently

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