Multi-day 🧵! Got SO many good questions during today’s #TechTalks21 for #Accessibility - I’m going to try to remember as many as I can and share some of the answers that came up over the next few days. Hopefully my memory proves strong!
1️⃣ Some Qs came up around accessibilityCustomActions. The goal of custom actions for VO, SC etc is to reduce UI clutter for the user. So, they’re great to use if your UI (like a cell) has a primary action already (like a nav action) and then many sub-actions as buttons.
1️⃣ Custom Actions can also be great for visually hidden UI (like the slide-over actions on cells) or gesture based UI. Lastly, they can be good for repeated UI (i.e. if every cell in your table has the same buttons, they’d likely be good as actions for the cell). More tomorrow!
2️⃣ We got some other great Qs around dynamic type. What do you do if your layout is not very flexible? Can you disable dynamic type? No! Def don’t do this! Dynamic type can be the difference between someone using your app and not. In fact, this is why I always say that…
2️⃣ …auto layout / flexible layouts are a hidden accessibly feature. They allow your text to grow and wrap as needed. So (1) always use flexible layouts — these benefit not just dynamic type, but localization and varying device sizes too! Another key we talked about (2) stacking!
2️⃣ …Once you hit the larger content size categories, consider moving form a horizontal to a vertically stacked and scrolling layout. You can even check with isAccessibilityCategory! To see this in action, check out Weather app (👏🏻 to @NovallSwift and team)!
3️⃣ What about dynamic type for custom fonts? You’ll want to map a configuration of your font to each of our text styles — then you can use UIFontMetrics to figure out the scale factor and scale correctly! This article is fantastic: useyourloaf.com/blog/using-a-c…
4️⃣ How do you change the default action when you double-tap and item with Voiceover on? You can override an API called accessibilityActivate!
5️⃣ What’s an #accessibility feature I wish more devs knew about? Smart Invert! But rather than tell you more myself, huge shoutout to @kharrison for writing this 🤩 awesome post about it:
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.