Open Radar

 
26-Oct-2009 09:27 AM Emanuele Vulcano:
Summary:
VoiceOver on iPhone makes applications accessible by allowing the user to enumerate, hear and manipulate onscreen components without the use of sight. However, it severely limits the usability of applications since it has the important limit of not allowing the application to direct the user's attention to onscreen changes that do not modify the layout of the screen, or do so in a limited way.

Steps to Reproduce:
• Optional: Obtain Mover 3.
Mover 3 is not yet available through App Store, but can be built from source from http://github.com/millenomi/mover-packaging (not easily though). Ad hoc builds are available upon request.

What follows is a thought experiment, mostly, so you don't need the actual software to run it.

(Suffice to say that Mover has onscreen elements (views) at the borders of the screen that appear and disappear to follow events on the network (other devices being detected by Bonjour on the local link). It also manages draggable "slides" each representing one piece of data (a photo, a contact, a video...). A screenshot that shows both elements is available at <http://gallery.me.com/millenomi/100044/0.%20Main> and is also attached to this report.)

The software does post accessibility notifications whenever an arrow or slide is added or removed.

• Run the software on a device with VoiceOver and screen curtain on.

Do any of the following:

• Run the software on another device connected to the same network so that an arrow would appear on the first one's screen.

- or -

• Use the Add button to add a slide to the table.

- or -

• Use another device to send an item to the VoiceOver device.

Expected Results:
VoiceOver should announce that an event occurred. For example: "Jack's iPhone has connected", "Contact 'John P.' added", or "A video was received from Jack's iPhone".

Actual Results:
VoiceOver is silent. VoiceOver's cursor may at times be moved silently without the user knowing it. The user has to constantly scan or to flick through the list of onscreen items to know that any of the aforementioned events occurred.

The application has no way to inform VoiceOver that an application-defined event occurred. Additionally, VoiceOver makes no attempt to deduce what happened from the data it has (for example, from the fact an accessibility element or view has been added or removed since the last notification).

Regression:
The application might inform the user through alerts every time such an event occurred, severely annoying sighted users. This would require the non-sighted user to turn on a preference, since we cannot detect whether VoiceOver is on or off. It might even state incorrectly that the screen layout significantly changed, causing VO to reset itself, but this still does not allow the app to announce exactly what event happened.