Design Meets Disability was recommended to me by accessibility consultant Jon Gibbins while we were sharing a long train journey through mid-Wales. We were talking, amongst many things, about our love for Apple products and their design. I am a hearing aid wearer, my aid is two-tone grey. A sort of dark taupe grey above,…
Accessibility traits are a group of attributes on a SwiftUI element. They inform assistive technologies how to interact with the element or present it to your customer. Each element has a selection of default traits, but you might need to change these as you create your UI. In SwiftUI there are two modifiers to use…
The European Accessibility Act, or EAA is due to become law in Europe later this year, and it defines some specific requirements for mobile. In fact, its the first accessibility legislation that I’m aware of, anywhere, that explicitly covers mobile apps. Since 2012 the European Union has been working on standardising accessibility legislation across Europe.…
I was asked by Capital One to contribute an accessibility piece to the Capital One Tech Medium. The blog, titled Baking Digital Inclusion Into Your Mobile Apps, briefly covers what we mean by disability and what we can do to make our mobile apps work better for everyone.
Images in SwiftUI are accessible by default. This is the opposite of what we’d experience in UIKit, where images are not accessible unless you set isAccessibilityElement to true. Sometimes making images not accessible to VoiceOver is the right decision. Like when using a glyph as a redundant way of conveying meaning alongside text. An example…
Like all accessibility features, Dynamic Type is about customisability. Many of your customers, and maybe even you, are using Dynamic Type without even considering it an accessibility feature. Dynamic type allows iOS users to set the text to a size that they find comfortable to read. This may mean making it a little larger so…
I’m riding on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto and wanted to jot down my thoughts from the 48 hours I spent in Tokyo. I’ll be back in a few days, but if I had to describe my initial impression it would be titled: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. For the first time in…
I won’t bury the lede, I’m looking to go back to work full-time. I’m thankful to not be under financial strain, so I’m not rushing into anything. Instead I’m coming at this from a place of genuine interest in finding the right opportunity for me. Recently I’ve had some great conversations with interesting companies, and…
Around my birthday (which is today 🥳) I always feel a lot of love. I’m incredibly lucky to have so much love in my life. From the love of my life, to the love of my cat, to the love of my friends, to the love for my fellow person — there is so much…
tldr; Want to skip straight to the news and find out about my new job? On December 15, 2014 I went to dinner with Jukay Hsu. I was 25 years old and not too proud to say yes to a free meal, and my friend Josh said I really should meet him. I was none…