Accessibility Hint When There are Multiple Actions

Hi there -- I'm cleaning up the accessibility in our app and making sure it adheres to Apple's suggested guidelines.

For accessibilityHint, apple lists a couple of suggestions in the doc here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/objectivec/nsobject/1615093-accessibilityhint

Notably this one is one that I'm having to change a lot in our app:

Don’t include the action type in the hint. For example, don't create hints like “Tap to play the song” or “Tapping plays the song.”

However, we have some buttons that do different actions based on a double or triple tap in VoiceOver, so our hint looks something like: "Double tap to do X, Triple Tap to do Y"

This violates the accessibilityHint guidelines, but I feel like changing this would mean the customer loses out on valuable information. What does apple suggest we do in this case?

Thanks in advance!

Answered by Frameworks Engineer in 787946022

Hi there! We recommend against this pattern because VoiceOver users can re-configure their action gestures. So for example, by default a single-finger triple tap will perform the Long Press gesture on an element. Users can re-map the Long Press gesture to be a two-finger triple tap, or quadruple-finger double tap. If someone has configured their gesture set differently, then opened your app and heard this hint it would not be accurate and thus potentially confusing.

These hints are serving a purpose for you, so I won't suggest that you remove them entirely, but switch up the wording instead. Consider hints like "Activate to do X", "Perform Long Press to do Y."

Accepted Answer

Hi there! We recommend against this pattern because VoiceOver users can re-configure their action gestures. So for example, by default a single-finger triple tap will perform the Long Press gesture on an element. Users can re-map the Long Press gesture to be a two-finger triple tap, or quadruple-finger double tap. If someone has configured their gesture set differently, then opened your app and heard this hint it would not be accurate and thus potentially confusing.

These hints are serving a purpose for you, so I won't suggest that you remove them entirely, but switch up the wording instead. Consider hints like "Activate to do X", "Perform Long Press to do Y."

Do you really want to hide features behind multiple taps? You've already said the hints are there to show "valuable information", so hiding it seems the wrong thing to do.

What are the three things that your one button does?

Wouldn't it make more sense to have three buttons, or a menu with those three options?

Accessibility Hint When There are Multiple Actions
 
 
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