Developer notes for iPhone a11y

Purpose

This document is a summary of accessibility problems that arise through the usage of VoiceOver on the iPhone 3G S. Most problems were encountered and described during a design walk-through with Everett (Sep 4, 2009 - Alison & Armin)

Please correct any error and fell free to add any a11y problems you know of for the iPhone VoiceOver.

Note from Everett

Steve Hockema might have knowledge about the technical problems of interfaces accessed with iPhone VoiceOver.
Everett is curious how a native iPhone application would compare to a Safari page in terms of accessibility and features offered for VoiceOver

Problem with embedded objects (according to Everett)

Safari on the Mac with VoiceOver does not announce an link if it is embedded within a heading or picture.
A picture embedded within a link is not announced

Everett's work around

Duplicate the link after the object the original link is embedded in (e.g. picture).
In order to make the duplicated object invisible use a CSS class to set:

height zero
position absolute
overflow hidden

Accordions or expanding/collapsing panels

Alison asked Everett for experience with accordion objects. Everett hasn't interacted with such an object with the iPhone VoiceOver.

Everett's thoughts:

if the object is native it should be supported by VoiceOver
if not, support for VoiceOver has to be added

Links activating the expanding or collapsing

Everett expects a link to load a new page and not to trigger an action on the existing page.

if it does only a collapse/expand action, the link should carry this information
not a big issue if the link makes clear what will happen (e.g. expand)
- Everett compares it with the visual cue that is given by the little arrows. A blind user needs a text base cue that tells more about the result to expect.
expanded stuff needs to come directly after the link that activated the expansion in the DOM order (visual representation does not matter)