Images should either be decorative or have a proper accessibility label or alt text that describes them. If they're decorative you can make it so they get skipped by assistive tech so it doesn't get in the way of the experience.
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...
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.
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!
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.
Content © Daniel Devesa Derksen-Staats on Accessibility up to 11! is licensed under CC BY 4.0. License details
