#365DaysIOSAccessibility

Day 196

The VoiceOver Rotor and power gestures

30 Nov 2022

RotorVoiceOveriOS

By

Dani Devesa Derksen-Staats

Once you learn some basic gestures with VoiceOver, it is very important to master he Rotor. It is very useful to also know some more power user gestures like the Magic Tap or the Escape gesture.

5 gestures from VoiceOver. There is a Twitter app open on the TwitterA11y profile screen. Rotating two fingers on the screen, like rotating a dial, will show you the rotor. In this case, a tweet is focused and VoiceOver will say: “Actions”. Then, you can swipe down to interact with the selected rotor option. VoiceOver will say in this example: “Reply”. Sometimes, you’ll need a double tap to confirm. In this case, doing so will open the screen to reply to that tweet. Back to the first screen, if you double tap with two fingers, that’s called the Magic Tap. It is meant to execute the most important interaction in the screen. In this case it will open the screen to compose a tweet. If you scrub with two fingers, like drawing a Z, it is called the Escape gesture. It should bring the user back to the previous screen. In the example, back to the TwitterA11y profile screen.

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Day 26

Meet the VoiceOver rotor

Meet the rotor. A menu that you activate (and change options) by rotating two fingers on the screen. It lets you select different navigation modes and customizations. Like navigating through headings or changing VoiceOver’s speaking rate.

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.

Day 43

image trait unlocks Image Explorer

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

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