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.

Calendar of Advent of iOS Accessibility. Day 9. Hidden actions not being accessible. Find alternative ways of actioning hidden interactions or that require complex gestures or gestures that conflict with VoiceOver's. Two examples. The first one is swiping left in a table view cell to unveil a delete option. That could be fixed by adding delete as a custom action. Second example is a bottom sheet menu with a grid of options. You need to swipe down to dismiss it. You'd probably need to implement the escape gesture for VoiceOver and it would be a good idea to add a close button anyway.

You may also find interesting...

accessibilitySpeechIPANotation is sometimes handy in English where a word is spelled the same but pronounced differently depending of the context. Some examples are: live, read... Or you may want to correct how VoiceOver pronounces your app's name! Example code in the image: ```swift let liveNewsChannelView = UIView() let attributedLabel = NSMutableAttributedString(string: "24 hour news channel. ") attributedLabel.append(NSAttributedString(string: "Live",attributes: [.accessibilitySpeechIPANotation: "laɪv"])) liveNewsChannelView.accessibilityAttributedLabel = attributedLabel ```

While you are at @shelly's "36 Seconds That Changed Everything", I would definitely also check out the Bonus Content. Including the full interview with @marcoarment. "Awareness is the biggest problem here." https://www.36seconds.org/behind-the-scenes/ "Cause iOS 7 was so inaccessible in so many ways (...) it started getting under developers’ radars this section of settings, called accessibility, that changes the way my app looks or works and I need to make sure that it doesn’t break under those settings.” "There’s so much variation out there. We no longer have just one size phone, we no longer have just one font size. It is easier for us as developers not to fall into bad assumptions of how I see it is how everyone is going to see it.” "The good thing about VoiceOver is that the accessibility framework is pretty well built-in the standard controls. For a given app you can fix any VoiceOver problems it has in one day or less. Even if it is a complex app. Even if it has a lot of custom controls." "What developers now do, if they care, is they treat that (accessibility issues) as if it was any other design flaw. If any other screen in your app broke visually or functionally you’d consider that a bug and you would try to fix it in the next update.” "I think the more that we can do as a developer community to talk about these features even existing, and these problems existing, and to tell people how easy it is to fix. That is the best any of us can do to help. Awareness is the biggest problem here."

"We have one job, and that's to make our apps work. And if you are not implementing accessibility features, you are forgetting about making it work for a lot of people" @NovallSwift Couldn't have said it better! https://x.com/novallswift/status/1328387659744505856

Created in Swift with Ignite.

Supporting Swift for Swifts