Accessibility for custom text editors

Originator:chad515
Number:rdar://10912882 Date Originated:2/22/2012
Status:Duplicate Resolved:Yes
Product:iPad SDK Product Version:5.0.1
Classification:Serious Bug Reproducible:Always
 
Summary: There is no way to provide accessibility support for custom text editors in iOS. UITextView provides accessibility support, but lacks rich text support and other abilities. Custom text editors can be built using Core Text and UITextInput (as illustrated in the Text, Web, and Editing Programming Guide for iOS), but there is no way to provide accessibility support for an editor of this sort.

Notes:
There are several possible protocols to conform to, but none of them seem to be the right choice for a standard text editor. Options seem to include:

UIAccessibilityContainer: This seems like the closest choice, but has no concept of text. I can conform to this and return a UIAccessibilityElement for every character, but that makes my view seem like a view of lots of single letter buttons. I can instead return words, but then there's no way to select individual characters and the user still can't read the text.

UIAccessibilityReadingContent: This seems close as well, but is geared toward a page-based system, rather than a scrolling editor like mine or that in Notes or UITextView.

Comments

Addressed in iOS 6

In iOS 6, you can now support VoiceOver simply by conforming to UITextInput. Just make sure your tokenizer is fully functioning. More info here: http://www.c-had.com/voiceover-support-for-custom-text-editors .


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