On Xcode 9 accessibility: issues and questions
On Xcode 9 accessibility: issues and questions
- Subject: On Xcode 9 accessibility: issues and questions
- From: Vincenzo Rubano <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2017 12:17:03 +0200
Hi all,
I’ve been playing with Xcode 9 under Mac OS 10.13 for a while now, but I cannot
figure out some accessibility aspects. All the features I am going to talk
about have already been documented publicly by Apple, so I don’t think I am
breaking the NDA. I know this message is borderline for this list due to its
topic, but given there are both Apple engineers and blind developers in this
list I think this is the best place to have this discussion. If any moderator
thinks otherwise, please let me know and I’ll try to find a different way to
get the discussion going.
One of the new Xcode features is a brand new source editor. However, I am
facing several accessibility issues:
A. VoiceOver find commands (Vo+f and friends) don’t work at all in the editor;
it seems they do, but keyboard focus is not moved to the place where the
occurrence of the pattern is.
B. When showing the editor, you cannot navigate its contents as any other text:
navigation with arrows don’t work unless you do weird stuff such as moving the
VoiceOver cursor back and forth from the editor, interacting and stop
interacting several times with the editor, navigating the code for a while by
using vo+arrows shortcuts, moving away and then back to Xcode or restarting
VoiceOver. I am listing all of these because… well, there is no definitive
solution to the issue: sometimes one of the items I listed above works,
sometimes the same item doesn’t. The issue occurs if the window is full screen
or not or you use the standard or assistant editor.
C. According to docs, in the editor issues are now presented in a completely
different way. However, by using VoiceOver I cannot figure out the line number
of the source code line affected by an issue and an easy way to jump straight
to it from within the editor. In Xcode 8 this was doable easily.
D. While typing, Xcode 8 used to insert automatically closing parens and
quotes: has this feature been removed or is it not working due to accessibility
issues?
Questions:
1. Are these issues known to Apple? If so, when is a fix planned? I know that
answering the second part of this question is hard, but since Xcode 9 brings
along with it Swift 4 and the iOS 11 SDK it could be important to know this, so
that one can plan when he/she should migrate his/her project.
2. When Xcode 9 comes out, will it be possible to keep submitting builds linked
against the iOS 10 SDK using Swift 3 and Xcode 8 to the appStore? If not, could
a review exception be requested due to these (and other) accessibility issues
introduced in Xcode 9? I’ve read this
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1806/_index.html
but deadlines are not stated explicitly.
3. As anyone found any workaround for these issues?
Cheers
Vincenzo Rubano
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