Drill-down into Accessibility container when auto-scanning with Switch Control
Drill-down into Accessibility container when auto-scanning with Switch Control
- Subject: Drill-down into Accessibility container when auto-scanning with Switch Control
- From: Martin Umgeher <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 14 May 2014 16:55:02 +0200
Hello,
I'm in the process of adding Accessibility support to an existing iOS app.
The users will mainly use the Switch Control feature, with a single hardware switch to control the app. Therefore, the auto-scanning option (i.e., the selection cursor automatically jumping from element to element) will be used.
I would like to group UI elements for auto-scanning: the auto-scan cursor should select the entire group of elements, and only when activated, should scan through the group's child elements. I have seen this feature in most of Apple's standard apps, e.g. the iTunes Store app: there, the main screen is split into three groups (the toolbar on the top, the large content pane, and the tab bar on the bottom). When selecting the content pane, its child elements are cycled through.
So far I tried to achieve this by implementing the UIAccessibilityContainer protocol in the container view of the to-be-grouped views, but without success: auto-scan still always jumps from element to element (I only could specify the order of elements with the method accessibilityElementAtIndex:). Also, I experimented with the promisingly-named property shouldGroupAccessibilityChildren, unfortunately without any success either.
The iOS Accessibility sample project from WWDC 2013 ("Custom Content Accessibility") shows the desired behaviour with the floor plan view in the center (when activating the floor plan map, the single rooms on the plan will be cycled through). However, when testing with this code, I found that by reducing the number of rooms (from 25 to 2), the drill-down feature stops working: with only 2 rooms on the plan, they will just be included in the top-level auto-scan cycle, without any drilling down.
BTW -- I am aware that this feature is only enabled when setting the "Group Items" option (in Settings/Accessibility/Switch Control) to on, and of course have considered this when testing. I used an iPad running iOS 7.1.1 for my tests.
Questions:
1) Is there a way to implement the described feature for 3rd-party developers?
2) Can you point me to any documentation, example code, etc. on this topic, or give me a hint on how to implement the feature?
Thanks,
Martin
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