CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosobjective-cuitableviewvoiceover
Bill L
Bill L

Reputation: 2826

VoiceOver not reading UITextField subviews

I've got a few custom UITableViewCells that I'm making accessible. I'm trying to get VoiceOver to read all the subviews when the cell is tapped. From my understanding, this is something you get for free when using or sublcassing UITableViewCell (Correct me if I'm wrong on that.)

The issue is in a few of my cells. In most of my cells, everything reads correctly. However, when I tap on a cell that contains a UITextField (or subclass of UITextField) it does not read the UITextField. It will read all the other elements (except the UIButton on one cell as well,) but will skip the text fields.

Does anyone know any reasons it would not read the UITextFields? And the one UIButton? Is there something special that needs to be done for those to be read? Or something special to be done to a UITableViewCell subclass that I haven't done?

Sorry for posting no code, I'm not really sure what code would be relevant to post since I don't see anything related to accessibility at all in the code. In the storyboard, it is selected as accessible for all elements I want read, however the UITextFields seem to ignore this setting.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2735

Answers (2)

MobA11y
MobA11y

Reputation: 18860

What you want to do is create a custom cell class, and override the accessibilityLabel property of that class. Collecting all subviews accessibility labels. I'm on a windows machine now, so pardon if this doesn't quite compile, but you should get the idea.

@implementation MyCustomCellViewClass

-(NSString*)accessibilityLabel {

    NSMutableString* result = [NSMutableString new];
    for (subview in [view accessibilityElementViews]) {
        [result append:subview.accessibilityLabel];
    }
    return result;
}

By including this as a property override, rather than setting accessibility labels at all potential points that it changes, you remove the concern of future devs overriding this behavior. You also gain automatic handling of dynamic elements within these cells, as the accessibility label will simply stay in sync with the accessibility information of the subviews. You can then include this class as a parent class of any future subclasses to trivially maintain this behavior. If any of your devs are dumb enough to remove this sub class from the inheritance tree you have bigger problems to deal with!

Make sure with this approach that your cell has the correct role. Whatever the active element of the cell is (be it a tab, link, button, etc) should be the role of your super view. The other elements are just informative.

Upvotes: 1

Teja Nandamuri
Teja Nandamuri

Reputation: 11201

Let's say your table cell has 4 elements a label, a button, a text field, a image view. All these elements are in the contentView of your tablecell.

To make sure the voice over reads all the 4 elements in your table cell, you need to tell the voice over that your contentview contains 4 elements.You can do this by adding all the elements in your contentView to the contentView's accessibilityElements Array.

 contentView.accessibilityElements=@[label,button,textField,imageView];

Then the voice over will not skip any of these 4 elements.

Upvotes: 0

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