Weird behavior with the item chooser

By Deborah Armstrong, 12 July, 2017

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

I am working on a guide for Applevis and I need a little help before I can pull it all together.

I have several semi-accessible or inaccessible apps I want to use. and I typically write to developers to ask they make their app accessible. I decided it would be helpful to create a boiler-plate letter that would save time and that I could also post to Applevis in the form of a guide that others can use.

But I'm not an apple developer, though I worked in the past as a Windows software engineer. So the first thing I did was collect links to Apple's developer guide that walk developers through adding accessibility to apps.

I then got the idea if I took a screen shot of the item chooser, I could include that with my letter to a particular developer, showing how voiceover read their graphical buttons.

But I wasn't sure if that would work, so I called Apple's accessibility tech support line and they hooked up to my phone with screen sharing.

We discovered for some apps, unfortunately, the perfectly accessible ones, the item chooser worked great.

But for the inaccessible or only semi-accessible ones, none of the app's elements actually appeared at all in the item chooser. But we did discover we could take a screen shot of it and it appeared on the support rep's screen.

He did some research and told me the verbage I should include in my letter to developers was
"Informative architecture" a term whose meaning I don't fully understand. He also said that the developer needed to
"define Infographics". He says any developer will know what that means. I assume it means "give your buttons a label".

What I'm hoping the community here will do is give some more explanation of this terminology, and share their experiences with the item chooser. Can it ever be used as an aid to show developers an access issue? Also do you have any other ideas for what could be included in my boilerplate letter?

All thoughts welcome. As with my other guides here, I will produce something that I promise to share.

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Comments

By Brian Tew on Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - 19:54

Excellent work, Deborah. I was wondering if there exists an app that
scans other apps and points out accessibility problems? Would such an app be useful or
even possible? I am only half geek on my dad's side, so I don't have a clue.