On the 1st of December 2022, we met again at the Snowdog HQ to talk about accessibility. This time the goal was to get more insight into the lives of visually impaired people. We had two speakers and as always a very active audience, that asked a lot of interesting and insightful questions. Do you want to know what we’ve learned? Keep reading!
Do you remember the last time you were on a beach and someone called or texted you? You wanted to check it, but the sun was shining so hard that you couldn’t see anything. You squinted your eyes, covered yourself with something and then finally after a great deal of effort you were able to read it. That is neither the most comfortable nor the most optimal way of using your smartphone. The thing is that a lot of people have to deal with much worse obstacles on an everyday basis when it comes to using technology. To get a better understanding and insight into the lives of people who are visually impaired, we talked to Przemek, a man with vision impairment, and asked him how he’s using the technology.
The series of Poznan Accessibility Meetup is still quite a fresh idea. We organize it because the topic is important to us. We implement accessibility, and we wish to educate others on that matter. That’s why in the middle of September, we have gathered for the second time to talk about the issues with A11y in both online and offline world. We’ve listened to three lectures and some very insightful questions. We prepared a sum up of it all. Enjoy!
Over two years ago I visited the Invisible Exhibition in Warsaw. It’s very unique; visitors are guided through several exhibitions in total darkness, to really experience life as a blind person. Afterwards, our guide, a man with a visual impairment, talked about the practical aspects that help the visually impaired operate in different situations, like signing documents, playing tennis etc, and he showed us how he uses the web.
In the past couple of weeks, we have discussed the basics of accessibility in iOS and VoiceOver gestures. Today, let’s continue with another Accessibility topic: Custom Views. VoiceOver will work out of the box in case of using UIKit components such as UILabel, UIButton, UISlider, etc. But what if you are using Custom Views, which use an overridden version of draw method, or you have used plain UIViews to compose them to draw some charts? Don’t worry! It is still super easy to support VoiceOver for Custom Views, which we’ll cover in this post.
