Day 125

Tap and hold bar items at large text sizes

20 Sep 2022

You may have noticed that navigation/tool/tab bars don't scale with large Dynamic Type sizes. It would take too much space from the screen leaving very little real estate for the actual content. A tap and hold will show the Large Content Viewer.

Apple TV app with the AX5 Dynamic Type configuration. The navigation bar and the tab bar look just the same as with the default configuration. A tap and hold to one of the tabs or the title in the navigation bar, though, will show a big square in the middle of the screen with a large icon or/and text previewing what we are touching.

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You should really try to support Dynamic Type. If you can’t for some reason, and you want to fall back to the Large Content Viewer, you can do so. I’d limit it to “sticky” bars. Maybe you have a custom tab bar, navigation bar, or similar? Check the UILargeContentViewerItem protocol. Most UIKit components conform to it already. You'll just need to set showsLargeContentViewer to true and add a UILargeContentViewerInteraction to your component. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uilargecontentvieweritem

If you have any web views in your app (Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, I'm looking at you), you can also support Dynamic Type for them. You can set an Apple system font with the same styles available for native development in your CSS.

The fastest way for testing Dynamic Type while developing, and to quickly see how your app's UI flows, is by using the "option + cmd + plus/minus" to increase/decrease the text size in your simulator.


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