Day 184

Bonus content from 36 Seconds

18 Nov 2022

While you are at @shelly's "36 Seconds That Changed Everything", I would definitely also check out the Bonus Content. Including the full interview with @marcoarment. "Awareness is the biggest problem here."

https://www.36seconds.org/behind-the-scenes/

Sketch from Marco Arment's Twitter profile pic. His handle is @marcoarment and he is the developer of the Overcast app. Quote of him says: It is just so easy that no matter what market demand or awareness of it is, as soon as you learn that VoiceOver exists, and as soon as you think that’s a thing you need to consider, most conscious developers who care about the quality of their app, in general, will immediately become embarrassed about any VoiceOver flaws and will seek to fix it.

"Cause iOS 7 was so inaccessible in so many ways (...) it started getting under developers’ radars this section of settings, called accessibility, that changes the way my app looks or works and I need to make sure that it doesn’t break under those settings.”

"There’s so much variation out there. We no longer have just one size phone, we no longer have just one font size. It is easier for us as developers not to fall into bad assumptions of how I see it is how everyone is going to see it.”

"The good thing about VoiceOver is that the accessibility framework is pretty well built-in the standard controls. For a given app you can fix any VoiceOver problems it has in one day or less. Even if it is a complex app. Even if it has a lot of custom controls."

"What developers now do, if they care, is they treat that (accessibility issues) as if it was any other design flaw. If any other screen in your app broke visually or functionally you’d consider that a bug and you would try to fix it in the next update.”

"I think the more that we can do as a developer community to talk about these features even existing, and these problems existing, and to tell people how easy it is to fix. That is the best any of us can do to help. Awareness is the biggest problem here."

Some of you have asked me how you can support what I do. This would really help, and would be hugely appreciated:

  • Find these posts useful? Share them at work, on social media, or with anyone that might find them interesting. Let's spread the word!

  • Check out any of my apps or games: Xarra!, RetroRapid!, or Mestre!.

    • A download and a review go a long way. They're free by default. On the App Store, ratings and reviews really help more people discover them.

    • Finding any of them useful? If so, and if you can afford it, purchasing lifetime access to all features or subscribing lets me buy the coffee that keeps me caffeinated. Caffeine keeps me going to maintain the apps, bring in new features that I hope you'll love, and keep writing.

You may also find interesting...

When configuring a largeContentImage or adjustsImageSizeForAccessibilityContentSizeCategory, it is important to use a pdf asset and preserve the vector data so the icons are crisp at any size.

You can add your Accessibility Shortcuts to Control Centre too. One more quick access point and one more reminder to get you testing often and quickly. How to enable Accessibility shortcuts: https://x.com/dadederk/status/1583519154165800960?s=61&t=_fK9Muzu2MyFEeJLVQZcJg

All the accessibility capabilities you can check for, have counterpart notification names you can observe in case the user changes its preferences while using your app. https://x.com/dadederk/status/1577435144129892352


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