Explore best practices for creating inclusive apps for users of Apple accessibility features and users from diverse backgrounds.

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I paid but did not receive a subscription
Good afternoon. I have a problem with the fact that they deducted $99 from me on February 13, 2025, but they never gave me a developer ID. I assume that the problem arose due to the fact that during the first attempts to write off, there was a limit on the card for online purchases. But then I removed this limit, and the payment went through. Please help me as I have been trying to register for a long time. Thank you
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Feb ’25
App Icon Shows Black Background in iOS 18 Settings Dark Mode
After updating to iOS 18, I've noticed that my app's icon displays correctly on the home screen but appears with a black background in the 'Settings > Apps' section when Dark Mode is active. The icon currently has a non-transparent gradient orange background, and I haven't set up a separate icon for Dark Mode. Has anyone else experienced this issue, or does anyone have suggestions for how to ensure the app icon looks the same in Dark Mode as it does in Light Mode?
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Oct ’24
Too many verification codes have been sent.
Hello, I have the following problem. I’m developing a NoCode app using the FlutterFlow platform and have been working on it for over a year. This time, after publishing a new version of the app through FlutterFlow, I tried logging into Apple Store Connect, but I got an error saying that I had made too many login attempts and needed to try again later. However, I hadn’t attempted to log in before that at all. No matter how long I wait—24 hours, 48 hours—the same error keeps appearing, meaning I still can’t access my account. Apple Support hasn’t responded for 4 days, and in total, I’ve been locked out of my account for over 9 days. Please help me understand what might be causing this issue. Apple Store Connect refuses to send me an SMS with the login code.
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435
Feb ’25
VoiceOver navigation in carousels
Hi all, I’ve got a usability question about accessibility navigation. My app has a lot of carousels (horizontally scrolling lists of content with far more elements than can fit on the screen). Often, these are just images, but sometimes, they’re cards with multiple subelements. In our previous implementation, each card was a single accessibility element, and we exposed the subelements as accessibility custom actions. Despite this, users frequently mentioned navigating with VoiceOver as a pain point. It takes a long time to navigate through and navigate past these carousels. To solve this, I converted my carousels into a single adjustable element, so users can navigate through it with one swipe, and they can still access the elements by adjusting the values up and down. I got this advice from this 2018 WWDC talk. Is this still the recommended advice? Or is there a new, preferred way to do this? Additionally, I had to get a little creative with the second carousel, the one with multiple subelements. Some of these were interactive (imagine a card with a description, an upvote button, and a downvote button). Adjustable elements override the accessibility custom actions VoiceOver gesture, so I can’t expose the individual buttons as actions. Instead, I made each subelement in each card in the carousel one of the adjustable values. Swiping up would go from description 1 to upvote button 1 to downvote button 1 to description 2, etc. Double tapping with VoiceOver would perform whatever action the carousel is currently on. So if I adjust the value to the element at index 2 (say, downvote 1), double tapping would trigger the downvote button’s action. Does this make sense? Is there a better way to do this? This seemed to be the best compromise between screenreader navigation speed, exposing all actions, and the existing UI.
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Jun ’25
User interface in Ainu.
I have mulling over this for many years ,Uralic and Siberian language user interface Support.Ainu of Japan is only supported by writing roman and rendering into Katakana with a few small modified characters there is no user interface ,spell,grammar checker,dictionary ,translator ,of course the Ainu has few terms in modern vocabulary but Iam studying the language in order to find words and coin new ones, iPhone hoomi-ye-p electric speak thing. I am looking for other peple who have the same idea.
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Oct ’24
SwiftUI Full keyboard access doesn't navigate through every button on screen
I have screen in my app that can represented by following layout, I would like this screen to be possible to navigate with full keyboard access but there is unexpected behavior: Path: Tap "Tab" on keyboard -> whole scrollview is targeted and inside the first button1 is selected. Arrow down -> selection changes to button3 Arrow up -> selection changes back to button1 So button2 is always skipped, there is no way to navigate to it by arrows left/right. Using Tab+F and searching "button2", button2 is correctly selected, so it's selectable but for some reason not findable by going through elements. Putting empty text in Text views cause buttons to be vertically aligned and then everything works correctly but it is not an option. public struct BugReportView: View { public var body: some View { ScrollView { VStack(spacing: .zero) { Button("button1", action: { }) HStack { Text("some text") Text("some text2") Button("button2", action: { }) } Button("button3", action: { }) } } } }
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May ’25
Apple is lying about its commitment to accessibility on macOS
I've just received an email from Apple regarding the Global Accessibility Awareness Day and some forthcoming sessions to promote their accessibility features. What a joke. For many years, Apple refuses to provide the most basic accessibility requirement on macOS: LET USERS DISABLE ALL NON-CONSENSUAL UNSOLICITED ANIMATIONS AND OTHER UI CONVULSIONS. The scourge of animations started from macOS Lion. Yes, many of them can be, fortunately, disabled through some obscure Terminal commands (that is, if the user is lucky enough to discover them on some obscure internet resources). The "Reduce motion" control in System Settings is a fake option that doesn't do anything. And there are two most glaring accessibility violations that cannot be disabled: Scroll bar rollover highlight effect introduced on macOS 10.7.3. Every time you move the cursor over a scroll bar, the bar gets highlighted. It results in bringing the user's attention to random scroll bars for no reason whatsoever just because the cursor happens to pass over the bar at some point. HUNDREDS of unnecessary, annoying events of distraction daily! Expand/collapse animation of NSOutlineView (such as when we open/close a folder in the list view in the Finder, as well as any other app that's using outline views). It's extremely annoying, distracting, and time-wasting. All feedback submitted about this through the years remains mostly ignored (except for a few cases where I received some ridiculous replies from employees who, apparently, are barely familiar with Macs in general). Apple does NOT care about accessibility. Not only this, but it's obvious that Apple is, in fact, intentionally abusing those users who can't tolerate distracting, time-wasting animations and UI convulsions.
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Apr ’25
Focus issues with ScrollView iOS18
When using an app via external keyboard, FocusState and .focused used to work just fine until iOS17. Vertical-axis textfields were also accessible without any issues. But after iOS18 update, adding focused modifier removes elements out of focus order of external keyboard. 1 such example is -when a button using focused modifier and @FocusSate is inside a ScrollView and if this view is getting opened via NavigationLink, that button is not accessible via Bluetooth (external) keyboard. TextEditor / Vertical-axis TextFields also seem to be impacted in external-keyboard-focus-order when added inside ScrollView. Is this a known iOS18 issue with ScrollView / any tip to get this fixed ? Sample code that can reproduce this issue: struct ContentView: View { @State private var showBottomSheet: Bool = false @State private var goToNextView: Bool = false @FocusState private var focused: Bool @AccessibilityFocusState private var voFocused: Bool var body: some View { NavigationView { VStack { Text("Hello, world!") // This button works fine in Bluetooth keyboard in all versions Button("Trigger a bottomsheet") { showBottomSheet = true } .focused($focused) .accessibilityFocused($voFocused) Button("Goto another view") { goToNextView = true } NavigationLink( destination: View2(), isActive: $goToNextView ) { EmptyView() } .accessibility(hidden: true) } .sheet(isPresented: $showBottomSheet, onDismiss: { focused = true voFocused = true }, content: { VStack() { Text("Hello World ! I'm in a bottomsheet") Button("Close me") { showBottomSheet = false } } }) .padding() } } } #Preview { ContentView() } struct View2: View { @FocusState private var focused: Bool @AccessibilityFocusState private var voFocused: Bool @State private var showBottomSheet: Bool = false var body: some View { ScrollView { VStack { Text("check") // In iOS18, this button doesn't get focused in Bluetooth / external keyboard // This issue occurs when these 3 combine in iOS 18 - a button using FocusState inside a view that has a ScrollView & it is opened via NavigationLink Button("Trigger a bottomsheet") { showBottomSheet = true } .focused($focused) .accessibilityFocused($voFocused) Button("Test button") { } } .sheet(isPresented: $showBottomSheet, onDismiss: { focused = true voFocused = true }, content: { VStack() { Text("Hello World ! I'm in a bottomsheet") Button("Close me") { showBottomSheet = false } } }) .padding() } } }
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Feb ’25
VoiceOver and currency - high amounts
I’ve noticed that the VoiceOver reads currency amounts correctly when they are below thousand. Then, for higher amounts, for example 12.225,34 € VoiceOver reads ‘twelve point two two five thirty four euros’ If the amount is formatted without the thousand separator (12225,34 €) this problem doesn’t exist. (VO reads twelve thousand two hundred and twenty five euros and thirty four cents) Why is the thousand separator a problem for VoiceOver if this formatting is coming from the currency and locale? This issue exists in English. I changed my device language to Italian and German and in both cases the number was read correctly even with the separator. Is there a way to make it work in English?
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2.2k
Jun ’25
Do Rotors add more Complexity to VoiceOver?
This may sound like a bit of an odd question, but this was what I was told this morning by one of our Accessibility managers. This past June at WWDC, I scheduled a lab session with Apple's accessibility folks for a review. I had the pleasure of working with Ryan who helped give the great VoiceOver Testing Talk from WWDC 2018. I believe I've worked with him before in the labs, but regardless, no matter who I meet with in the Accessibility Labs they always provide me with some new nugget of information that I learn, no matter how well versed I might think I am in Accessibility. After the labs, I made all the changes that Ryan suggested and also told other developers on my team of what I was taught. In our app we provide various forms, and each field component that appears in the form has a header text which we apply a header trait to. This allows for the use of a Header Rotor to quickly navigate between all the questions in the form, say if a user wants to return to a previous field etc. I even suggested we should take the time to provide a custom rotor that would allow users to navigate to fields that may be in an error state. If say the user submits the form, and the responses are validated, if 1 or multiple fields be in error we should have a rotor to allow the user to navigate directly to those fields. They may not be able to see the Red text / red outlines of those fields. This morning, I was told that I needed to undo that. That our headerLabel properties should not be marked with the UIAccessibilityTrait.header trait. When I stated that it makes navigation of the form much easier via the Headers Rotor, I was told by the Accessibility Manager this is not the case. I have the MS Teams transcript in front of me, which reads as follows (give or take a few transcript errors) So I went ahead and I just double checked with two of my friends, who are blind and for them on their end, they both said that they would not actually use that, and could add more complexity, because they have—in addition to being blind—but there's also mobility limitations. So they actually can't even use the Rotor at all. They only can use the swipes. Does this make sense to anyone, because it doesn't to me? Thoughts on this?
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Dec ’24
German VoiceOver says "millibars" instead of "megabytes"
In SwiftUI, iOS 18.1.1, Xcode 16.1, the following control: Text(12345678, format: .byteCount(style: .binary)) displays text with MB (megabytes) unit, but German VoiceOver reads it as "millibars". I tried explicitly specify units with: Text(12345678, format: .byteCount(style: .memory, allowedUnits: .mb)) but the result is the same (German VoiceOver still says "millibars"). Aside from creating own accessibility label, is there any way to go around that?
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Dec ’24
NSAlert button background/contrast
If I use NSAlert the buttons look like this: The Cancel button has a gray background. We got complaints about the bad contrast and people pointed out that the alerts from System Settings look like this: Here the Cancel button has a white background. Unfortunately I did not find out how to make the buttons in my own alerts look like those in System Settings. Setting the button's bezel color to white did not work. Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks. Best regards, Marc
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Feb ’25
Developer Mode Restart without HomeButton
After enabling Developer Mode on my iPhone and restarting it, the device asks me to press the Home button to confirm. Unfortunately, my Home button is broken, so I can’t access Developer Mode. The iPhone itself still works, but I can’t enable the mode. Is there any way to bypass this without the Home button?
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Mar ’25
Add words to Voice Control
I want to create a utility to import a list of words to the Voice Control user custom vocabulary. Is there an API to do this? I noticed if you use the built-in export vocabulary functionality (Settings > Accessibility > Voice Control > ...) the file that gets exported is a plist document type. If there is no API to add words programmatically should I just create a utility that generates a plist file and import it using the built-in import vocabulary functionality (Settings > Accessibility > Voice Control > ...)?
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Oct ’24
Female English Indian Siri Voice Pronounces Certain Words in the American Pronunciation Instead of the correct Pronunciation
I just downloaded the public release of iOS 18.2. I found a bug when using the English India female Siri voice, it’s pronouncing certain words using the American pronunciation instead of the correct pronunciation that the voice is supposed to have. For example, the Siri voice says the American pronunciation of the word privacy. This is definitely a bug that needs to get resolved as soon as possible. Can you please fix this right away?
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Dec ’24
Attempting to go directly to a help book page results in the main help book page being displayed instead
There is an issue with Help Books that started with the release of macOS 14.4. The issue is that when an app attempts to go directly to a Help Book page, the help viewer opens to the Help Book's main index page, rather than the specific page requested. As I investigated the issue I found that the requested page was actually part of help viewer's navigation history, and all I had to do was to click the Back navigation arrow and the requested page would be displayed. So it seems like the requested page is momentarily visited but is then (for whatever reason) quickly replaced by the main index page. Our app uses the AHGotoPage() API for directly accessing our Help Book's pages. This is the same mechanism/code that our app has used for more than a decade and has never caused us any issues. Everything works fine on macOS 14.3.0 and earlier. I've scoured the documentation and can't find any newer APIs for accessing Help pages. I've also tried various other things (e.g. reworking the code, creating new indexes for the app's Help, etc.), but none of it seems to make a difference. As far as I can tell, the issue seems to stem from some change made to the OS. So my questions are: Is this a known bug? And if so, is there any ETA on a fix? Is there something different we should be doing for newer versions of the OS (create indexes differently, use a different API, etc.)?
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