David Sweetman: VoiceOver is Awesome

I think that developers can underestimate howawesome UIAccessibility is. The iPhone has amazing potential as an accessibility tool, and it's used by a majority of visually impaired smartphone users. Well-designed apps really can offer meaningful improvements in peoples' everyday lives. But mobile isn't like other platforms where users can hack together scripts to improve the accessibility of poorly designed apps. It's up to the application developer to provide adequate support for all users, and it's unfortunately common to see apps where VoiceOver interaction is broken.

Apple has made UIAccessibility pretty easy to support, but it does take some intentional effort and an understanding of the tools and usage patterns. In this talk, my goal is to give you basic familiarity with the accessibility tools as a user uses them, basic familiarity with the UIAccessibility API, some UX intuition for users with visual impairments, and some simple helpers and tools to make implementation easier.

Transcript

1. VoiceOver is Awesome David Sweetman
2. 1. For real, these technologies are awesome 2. VoiceOver is easy to use and understand 3. UIAccessibility is powerful and approachable
3. First…
5. 1975: The Optacon ‘Optical to Tactile Converter’
6. Visually Impaired users are often highly motivated and highly skilled people, and they’re looking for apps that will help them accomplish things efficiently.
7. Without a focus on accessibility, the iPhone would be a very limiting technology. By adding tools that make it accessible to many people, Apple has tuned it into an incredible accessibility tool
8. VoiceOver Demo Settings > General > Accessibility > VoiceOver
9. To interact with your app, users need to be able to: • Navigate to any component • Understand the component • Use the component
10. UIAccessibility
11. There is always some work for you to do to make sure your app is accessible. It’s true that often there isn’t much work to do, but you do need to be intentional about making your app accessible.
12. 1. Use the views as they are intended to be used 2. Make sure they have appropriate descriptions and usage instructions. 3. Try them out! To make sure UIKit views are accessible:
13. BOOL isAccessibilityElement; UIAccessibility
14. NSString *accessibilityLabel; UIAccessibility
15. NSString *accessibilityHint; UIAccessibility
16. NSString *accessibilityValue; UIAccessibility
17. UIAccessibilityTraits accessibilityTraits; UIAccessibility
18. BOOL isAccessibilityElement; NSString *accessibilityLabel; NSString *accessibilityHint; NSString *accessibilityValue; UIAccessibilityTraits accessibilityTraits; These will allow us to describe most of the things in our app.