#365DaysIOSAccessibility

Day 204

isAccessibilityElement and nested controls

8 Dec 2022

accessibilityElementiOS

By

Dani Devesa Derksen-Staats

If a view has isAccessibilityElement to true, assistive tech won't look for any of its subviews. That means that if there are any buttons inside, they won't be accessible. You can add custom actions to that element though.

Calendar of Advent of iOS Accessibility. Day 8. Inaccessible buttons within accessible views. Example of the Mastodon app. If we make the table view cell representing a post an accessible element so it is easier to navigate, the subviews, including the buttons, won't be accessible anymore. So how can a VoiceOver, Keyboard, Voice Control, or Switch Control user interact with them? Custom actions to the rescue. In SwiftUI there is a new modifier, since iOS 16, called accessibilityActions. Before, you had to add the actions one by one. In UIKit, there is an accessibilityCustomActions property, which is an array of UIAccessibilityCustomAction.

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Day 93

Group distant views with UIAccessibilityElement

Sometimes you can create your own accessibility elements from scratch to group elements too. Perhaps because they're not contained in the same superview. You can combine these elements' frames and provide a suitable accessibility label.

Day 106

Prefer combine before accessibilityElement ignore

Apple asks us to consider the combine behavior, before using ignore, for .accessibilityElement(children: ). And for good reason, if combine works, and later on you decide to change the UI, the accessibility attributes will be updated for you.

Day 99

Group chart data into accessibility chunks

When making charts accessible, sometimes you may have just too many data points for the user to have to go one by one through all of them. In those cases, you can create accessibility elements that represent meaningful chunks of the graph.

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

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