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Re: [iOS app] acctivate button inside tile

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From: Malthe Jepsen
Date: Nov 20, 2023 11:14AM

That's an excellent question. For what it's worth I love the flexibility of VoiceOver actions in the rotor, as it minimizes the amount of elements in the focus order, which makes navigation through dynamic content, such as a feed, much more efficient, as it requires les swipes per new item.
I would advocate for including the secondary actions, such as "add to favorites", in the rotor.
Lots of other apps do this, including Apple's own phone and mail apps.
Regarding your question about it being announced late in the reading flow: This is VoiceOver standard behaviour, so hopefully the user will catch it or attempt engaging the rotor. You can also add an accessibility hint to the item in question to emphasize that the rotor can be used here.
Keep in mind that this is just my personal opinion.

Best
Malthe
> On 20 Nov 2023, at 14.02, Bart Simons < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> We test the accessibility of an iOS app. There are tiles with a relatively long information. You click the tile to perform an action. But the tile also contains a button that triggers a different action such as an "Info" icon that provides more information or an asterisk to mark as favorite.
>
> The developers have grouped the information so that VoiceOver reads the whole tile content in one go and no need for multiple swipe actions to read the tile's content. This is helpful as not to loose context.
>
> But the developers say that they don't know to make the button inside the tile accessible. Ideally it can be reached with the next swipe but developers say they cannot focus a button that is part of a tile that in itself is clickable.
>
> Is there really no way to do that?
>
> They propose to add a custom action to the tile. Swiping down with VoiceOver would then provide access to "more info" or "mark as favorite".
>
> I have a few remarks on this:
> VoiceOver announces the existence of custom actions only after reading the relatively long information in the tile. It is very likely that a VoiceOVer user will not listen until the end and thus not discover the message that custom actions are available.
>
> I think that custom actions are meant as shortcuts to provide quick access to actions that also can be performed in another way. Is it acceptable that a function is only available through a custom action?
>
> Do you know of a better soulution to, on the one hand group information in a clickable tile but on the other hand also provide access to a button inside the tile?
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Bart Simons
> AnySurfer - Voor een toegankelijker internet
> +32 2210 6149
> https://www.anysurfer.be/
>
>
> > > >