Making Your iOS app Accessible: A Crash Course

Apple has long done a superb job of providing high-quality accessibility tools for their mobile platforms. Making your iPhone or iPad app work well with those tools, however, still requires thought, planning, and effort from developers. And now with SwiftUI, those of us who have already been creating accessible interfaces have a whole pile of new things to learn!

In this presentation, Sean McMains from HEB will guide us through a tour of the things that we, as developers, need to do to make our Apps usable for those with a variety of different physical abilities. We'll first discuss the various ways that can approach our apps: from switch inputs to braille readers to Voiceover, there's a lot to consider! We'll learn how to test our apps for accessibility with the Accessibility Inspector and by using Voiceover ourselves. We'll then look together at how to support these different ways of using our apps, both in UIKit apps and those written with SwiftUI.

Finally, we'll have a look at some examples of where real-world apps haven't been as accessible as we'd like and to fix those problems. And a Q&A will round out our time together, where we can talk about strategies or specific accessibility challenges that attendees have encountered.