Day 197

Unlabelled elements: the issue I see most often

1 Dec 2022

One of the accessibility issues I see more often in iOS apps, believe it or not, is unlabelled elements. This happens especially for buttons with an icon but no title. In those cases, you need to configure an accessibility label manually.

Calendar of the Advent of iOS Accessibility. Day 1. Buttons with no labels (especially buttons with an icon, but no title). Button with a bell, that intends to let the user see the notifications. If the button has no accessibility label, VoiceOver could say things like: button, bellIcon, possibly notification... far from ideal! A good accessibility label would be

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You may also find interesting...

Some recommendations for improving your accessibility labels: don't add the element type, avoid redundancy and verbosity, localize... @MobileA11y has an excellent blog post on it: https://mobilea11y.com/blog/writing-great-labels/ @jordyn2493 has a great video too: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/254/

This is a small trick I use to compose complex accessibility labels/values when, for a UI component, some elements might not be in all its instances. An array of optional Strings, compact map, and join all elements by a separator, like a comma.

Very often we need to show a UISwitch preceded with a UILabel that explains what it does. The text in the label is basically the accessibility label for the switch. Ideally we want for both components to be grouped behave as a UISwitch. It makes much easier to understand what the switch does, compared to having two separate accessible components. There is a number of ways you can do that. One of them is to use a container view and proxy the switch accessibility attributes.


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