| Hello list, I'm trying to get back into Xcode, now that I have a better schedule and, more to the point, some issues in 7.x surrounding VO have been fixed in 7.3. I was stymied today by a tab bar, though, and hope there may now be an alternative that I'm unaware of. The old way of making connections between view controllers in Xcode, using VoiceOver, seems to be too unreliable.
The way this is supposed to work is pretty simple. I want to add a navigation controller to a tab bar, so I drag a tab bar item into the nav VC (easily done). I then select the tab bar scene, go to its connections inspector, find the view controllers section, put VO on the "connect view controllers, AX button" and focus the mouse on the same place using vo-cmd-f5. This is the same process I'd use to drag over items from the library, and it usually works. However, when I did this earlier today, the mouse kept landing on what Vo calls an 'empty scroll area'. By querying the mouse position, I can tell that VO thinks the button I need is 0.6 inches right of the only view controller connection currently in the tab bar (which was put there by embedding, using the Editor menu). If I place the mouse on the existing connection and physically slide it right, though, I do indeed land on an empty scroll area, not a button. it's the opposite of the problem screen readers often have, where a button that appears visually is inaccessible; here, we seem to have a button that's accessible, but not visually present. The mouse, then, has nothing to drag, and therefore no way to add another tab to my tab bar. Embedding this second nav VC just creates a whole new tab bar controller, which isn't what I want at all.
Why this keeps happening in Xcode, I don't know. Yes, I plan to file a bug (yet again, not that they seem to do much good). What I'm hoping is that there's another, more reliable way that someone knows about. I know you'd normally just control-drag between the items on the canvas, but for VO, that's not really an option. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd very much appreciate hearing them. Every time I think Xcode is finally, finally going to work, something like this comes along. Maybe 8 will fix all the problems once and for all. Here's hoping.
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Have a great day, Alex Hall
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