Have you ever seen VoiceOver randomly focusing on elements of the previous view when presenting a custom modal view? That can be fixed by letting the system know that the presented view is modal in terms of accessibility.

Day 207
11 Dec 2022
Have you ever seen VoiceOver randomly focusing on elements of the previous view when presenting a custom modal view? That can be fixed by letting the system know that the presented view is modal in terms of accessibility.

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When presenting a UI component that overlays the existing UI, you may have found that VoiceOver starts to randomly jump between the overlaid UI and the elements underneath. To avoid that, you can set its accessibilityViewIsModal to true. When setting the accessibilityViewIsModal to true for a view, VoiceOver will ignore its sibling views, treating it as if it was a modal. Useful when presenting custom popups, popovers, modals, action sheets, etc. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/objectivec/nsobject-swift.class/accessibilityviewismodal

If your watch app has good VoiceOver support, chances are you'll also have good Assistive Touch support. But an improvement you can make is to implement a quick action (triggered with a double pinch) when there is a main action you can perform.

By its name, I misunderstood what shouldGroupAccessibilityChildren does the first time I saw it. It can be used for VoiceOver to traverse all items in a view before moving to the next one, instead of grouping as in combining those elements. VoiceOver traverses elements in the natural reading order, from left to right, top to bottom, in left-to-right languages. Sometimes data is displayed in columns, so that order might not be the most logical one. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/objectivec/nsobject-swift.class/shouldgroupaccessibilitychildren
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