On Nov 12, 2010, at 3:15 PM, Kenny Leung wrote:
Hi All.
I'm working on accessibility in an app, and would like to have a
view pop up on screen and immediately become the focused item so
that its text will be spoken. There seems to be no call to
"becomeAccessibilityFocus" like there is "becomeFirstResponder".
The first thing I'd have to ask is: Why are you trying to force the
voiceover user to hear this message as soon as it comes up? Is it somet
hing warning of computer failure? Is it critical information that if
they don't get it will cause loads of things to break? If not, then
you shouldn't be trying to force the user to hear it regardless of how
important *you* think it is.
The voiceover user has a lot to deal with, and one thing that will
irritate vo users to no end (me included) is when applications hijack
my workflow, and force me to do something ZI had no interest in
doing. Vo already gets a notification when you pop-up a window, just
make it an alert, and let the voiceover user go to the warning when
they get around to it.
When leopard came out, the default behavior of voiceover was to
automatically move to a newly loaded web page. Now, imagine ifyou
will, you press a link to load a new page, and since it's taking a
while to load, you switch over to mail, and are happily typing a
response to a message, and poof, you're back in safari with no
indication you were yanked out of mail, and no explanation of how you
got there.
Thankfully, this is no longer the default, though it can be set in
preferences for folks who like that sort of thing. I absolutely hated
this behavior, and until I got the ability to turn it off, I was just
about ready to throw my copy of leopard out the window, go back to
tiger, and just ignore any future updates.
Don't introduce behavior into your application that interrupts
workflow. If you wouldn't hijack the keyboard/mouse/screen for a
sighted user, then don't hijack voiceover for the visually impaired
user. It's just good computing practice.
If your warning is delivered properly, the vo user will get to it when
they get to it, and not before. Trying to force the vo user to do
something just because you think it's important is not (imo) the way
to earn trust and encourage folks touse your app.
Developers aren't doing vo users favors by yanking them out of their
other applications, moving their cursors around, or changing what
their told as a result of doing nothing to affect those actions.
Please keep this in mind when developing accessible programs.
Voiceover users have no more desire to have their work interrupted
than you do, so try to be consistent in how you present information,
and don't think that because you think something is important, the
user will place the same importance on it._______________________________________________
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