UITextInput not announced correctly by VoiceOver

user_8508810 0
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I have a problem with how VoiceOver announces my custom UITextInput while it has the keyboard focus: When the accessibility focus is moved to the UITextInput view by swiping left/right the UITextInput is correctly announced by VoiceOver and I am hearing something like Text field, is editing, <content of text input>, character mode, insertion point at end.

However, if I move the accessibility focus to the UITextInput by tapping on it, VoiceOver says empty line, which is not correct.

I would expect VoiceOver to make the exact same announcement regardless of how the UITextInput got the accessibility focus.

Any ideas what might be the cause of this strange behavior?

uiaccessibility voiceover accessibility ios
1 Answers

To mark up a text field you need to take advantage of a few different properties. First, the "Text field" part you can only get by having your custom control extend the UITextFIeld class. That's the only way you can get that announcement at the beginning without effecting the read out of other things. You could append this to the label. Here are the properties I would recommend for your custom text editor.

Preferred Markup

ClassType: Subclass of UITextField (Probably the most important piece)

AccessibilityLabel: The thing the entered text represents (Ex: Password, Username, etc).

AccessibilityValue: The entered text.

AccessibilityHint: "Some non critical information, that shares some details about what the entered information will be used for."

AccessibilityTraits: (NOT Static Text Trait)

Note that the hint isn't crucial information. Hints are frequently ignored, and just contain useful clarifying information.

Aleternate markup (NOT RECOMMENDED)

ClassType: Subclass of ????

AccessibilityLabel: Text field, $EditingState, $EnteredText, $InsertionPoint

AccessibilityValue: nil

AccessibilityHint: nil

AccessibilityTraits: StaticText (Weird, but if you're including role information yourself, we want the trait of static text on an editable text field, to avoid VoiceOver being smart, including it, and duplicating role information in the announcement... is this starting to feel like a hack yet???)

This is honestly a terrible idea, you really should just have your TextField inherit from the system UITextField and get all of that stuff for free, but if you must, this is how you wold achieve... similar behavior without doing so. I say similar because there are a few things you CANNOT replicate in a custom control.

  • keyboard type ("character mode") is more painful for you to grab than the system, and I recommend omitting in the custom case. The keyboard doesn't have to respect your requests for mode changes (custom keyboards and such), you can get into trouble and confuse users attempting to share this based on your application's settings. The system is the only thing that can get this right in all scenarios.
  • Inflection. By doing this the custom way you will lose the style and inflection from VoiceOver. The pauses between the Label and the Entered Text. The lower voice that is read when the placeholder text is read out, etc. You can add commas to your AccessibilityLabel to somewhat replicate some of this, but ultimately, your custom control will always sound a little "off" to a VoiceOver user... unless your custom view extends UITextField...
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