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Enhancing Accessibility in SwiftUI: Effective Strategies
Make your apps inclusive with simple steps!
This guide complements our journey in making SwiftUI apps more user-friendly and inclusive. If you’re interested in SwiftUI development, don’t miss out on my other works, such as the SwiftUI Fundamentals covered on my GitHub page.
Difficulty: Beginner | Easy | Normal | Challenging
This article has been developed using Xcode 15.0, and Swift 5.9
Terminology:
Accessibility: Refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities.
SwiftUI: A framework by Apple for building user interfaces for all of its platforms.
View Modifier: A function in SwiftUI that changes the view’s display or other properties.
The background
In SwiftUI, accessibility settings are typically configured using the built-in accessibility modifiers, which are applied directly to views.
The three main methods we might use are:
- setting accessibility properties directly on the view
- passing accessibility values through an initializer
- applying a custom modifier
can either set accessibility from the outside, pass it in an initialiser or through a custom modifier.
There are more ways of doing this. I’ve also covered binding in this article because why not? In this case you can control the accessibility features of a view based on some state that exists outside the view
The techniques
External Accessibility Settings
This is the common way that accessibility is set on views in SwiftUI.
Sometimes, you want to modify a view’s accessibility features from the outside. This method is particularly useful when accessibility attributes depend on external factors, such as user settings.
Text("A standard Text component")
.accessibilityLabel(Text("This is standard accessibility"))
