Day 203

7 Dec 2022

Full Keyboard Access Switch Control VoiceOver iOS

Grouping elements when it makes sense can make a huge impact on easing navigation with some assistive technologies like VoiceOver, Switch Control, or Full Keyboard Access. It also helps on reducing redundancy.

Calendar of Advent of iOS Accessibility. Day 7. Grouping elements for easier navigation. There is an example using the Foursquare app. There is a list of restaurants. Each restaurant has a name, type, location, and rate. By default, you'd need four swipes to the right with VoiceOver to go from one restaurant to the next one. That's 32 swipes to go through 8 restaurants. If we group all these, it is just a single swipe to go from one item to the next one, easing navigation a lot. There is another example showing Next Door. The post in the example would require 9 swipes. So you can see how things can quickly get worse for more complex views. In that case, each post has a more options, like, reply, and share buttons that would repeat for every single item causing lots of redundancy.

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Custom actions work as great on Switch Control as they do in VoiceOver. It makes navigation much, much, faster and you’ll be able to find all those custom actions in the Switch Control menu.

Day 205

If you have interactions that are hidden or require complex gestures to be performed or that may conflict with VoiceOver, you need to provide alternative ways of executing these actions. Custom actions can help a lot of times, but not always.

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Day 175

Accessibility Labels are not just for VoiceOver, and Accessibility User Input Labels are not just for Voice Control. The latter will also help Full Keyboard Access users to find elements on the screen by different names. Good API design!

Full Keyboard Access Voice Control VoiceOver accessibilityLabel accessibilityUserInputLabels iOS

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