finding color of item in focus with Voice Over on iOS

By Dennis Long, 8 August, 2023

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iOS and iPadOS

how do I find the color of the current item in focus using Voice Over

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By PaulMartz on Wednesday, August 23, 2023 - 19:51

This feature might be very difficult to implement, for exactly the same reason that color identifiers often produce unsatisfactory results.

On Mac OS, I can get the color of editable text with VO+T. In this edit window, VO+T tells me "a shade of gray".

If focus is on a photograph, what would you want VoiceOver to say? Perhaps "multicolor", or "true color."

What if focus is on a mostly blue button with highlights and shadows so it looks 3D, and also has black button text? You might want VoiceOver to say "blue". But how would VoiceOver know that's what you want?

Even in the case of a solid color, the color name isn't always obvious. Computers store colors as three values, one each for red, green, and blue. Many colors are some combination of these RGB values. Various color tables exist to translate between these values and human readable color names, such as mauve, peach, taupe, vermillion, firebrick, etc. VoiceOver would have to select the nearest match from such a table.

It seems like this can be made to work, but we would have to acknowledge that it's a difficult task, and such a feature would have limitations.