Tag: accessibilityLabel
36 posts
Sometimes, buttons change meaning, for example when toggled. An example is a play button, tap it and it becomes a pause button. In such case, updating its accessibility label will be clearer than trying to convey the change with traits or values.
Very often we need to show a UISwitch preceded with a UILabel that explains what it does. The text in the label is basically the accessibility label for the switch. Ideally we want for both components to be grouped behave as a UISwitch. It makes much easier to understand what the switch does, compared to having two separate accessible components. There is a number of ways you can do that. One of them is to use a container view and proxy the switch accessibility attributes.
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.
Please, don't use accessibility labels as ids for your UI tests. It can completely ruin the experience for VoiceOver users. There is actually an accessibility identifier property that you can use instead to uniquely identify your UI elements.
It is possible to embed icons within text using NSTextAttachment and NSAttributedString. If you do, please remember to override the accessibility label, otherwise VoiceOver will announce it as "Attachment.png File".
Example code in the image:
```swift
let magnifyingGlassIcon = UIImage(systemName: "magnifyingglass")!
let searchButton = UIButton()
let searchTutorialLabel = UILabel()
searchButton.accessibilityLabel = "search"
let textAttachment = NSTextAttachment(image: magnifyingGlassIcon)
let string = "Select the
When thinking about accessibility labels and values, it is easy to miss adding information or state that are represented by little visual cues and icons: a checkmark indicating something has been played, a down arrow indicating a downward trend...
When interacting with a button with VoiceOver, the accessibility label is repeated to the user. If you are playing some audio, it could be difficult to listen to it properly. To avoid that, you can add the .startsMediaSession accessibility trait.
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!
Do you know when a UI element is greyed out to show that it is disabled? Yes, there is an accessibility trait for that too: .notEnabled. VoiceOver will say “dimmed” after its accessibility label and Voice Control and Switch Control will skip it.
The .selected accessibility trait indicates when an element has been selected. You’ll notice that VoiceOver announces “selected” before the accessibility label. You can find that in the system for the selected tab in the tab bar, for example.
The link accessibility trait is applied to UI elements that open some web content. It usually appears in-line in the content and represented by underlined text, but not always. VoiceOver will say "link" after the accessibility label.
With the button trait VoiceOver will read “button” after the accessibility label and will indicate the user that, when focused, they can double tap anywhere on the screen to interact with it. UIButton has this trait by default.
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