Re: Voiceover support
Re: Voiceover support
- Subject: Re: Voiceover support
- From: Alex Hall <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2015 13:38:22 -0500
- X_v_e_cd: 95c31f2c91973597a5409d192b769473
- X_v_r_cd: 497e765d3132f6fff6605a191efe50cb
> On Nov 13, 2015, at 08:09, Daniel Phillips <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> I work at Trainline on their iOS app. We had some customer feedback recently and unfortunately someone booked a ticket for the wrong date because we botched our voiceover support!
> Safe to say our app as it stands is using accessibility solely for UI Testing purposes and any voiceover functionality is purely coincidence.
>
> I've been adding voiceover support and my question is, to what level do you suggest I go with it. By which I mean, we have a lot of data on screen, departure times, departure station name, a label showing the duration of travel in an abbreviated format etc etc.
>
> These labels could all be on say a single table view cell.
>
> I just added support for the following: "2h 25m, direct" to read out "2 hours and 25 minutes. Direct train."
>
> And then I began work on the departure/arrival time. Then it hit me, I don't really know what I'm going for. It currently reads out something like "10:20. London. 14:36. Manchester", but having added a nicer support in the previous duration example, I'm tempted to have voiceover read something like "Departing 10:20 from London. Arriving 14:36 at Manchester"
Makes sense to me, actually. It's not what is visually there, but I'd rather hear that kind of description, since, as a VO user, I can't look at the top of the table to see which column is which. Especially when you start throwing times around, having clarity is great. It's also good that you've combined all these items into a single string, so there's no need to swipe five times just to read one cell.
>
> Of course there's no limit on what you could do with this, but I wanted your thoughts on how far is too far. I want to make sure they get all the info, but is being too chatty a bad thing?
Purely from my perspective as someone who relies exclusively on VoiceOver, I think there's a difference between clarity/efficiency and "too far". Too far, in my view, would be presenting things that aren't visually there or making a whole separate interface to be presented if VO is on. It would also be adding way too much extra wording, such as "this train departs from London at exactly 10:00 in the morning". All you need is "departs London at 10:00" (obviously formatting that time to the user's setting). But your example is, I think, well within the realm of reasonable. You briefly, but clearly, describe the times and destinations, and you use punctuation to break it up and make it easier to listen to. Were I to read that on my phone, I wouldn't think twice about it, and I'd think what a nice job the devs did making it easier to use.
As I said, though, that's just me--one guy's opinion. I'd suggest two things: 1) you may want to join email@hidden to ask this; 2) you could post a forum topic on www.applevis.com to request feedback from a much wider range of people who all use VoiceOver, braille, etc. As I said, though, you're definitely on the right track (sorry, bad pun) with what you've done so far, IMHO.
>
> Would love your feedback.
>
> Daniel
>
> Sent from my iPad
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--
Have a great day,
Alex Hall
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