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by nindalf 1590 days ago
I’m surprised by how much progress we’ve made in this area. I used to make android apps circa 2013-15. Accessibility was an afterthought, a nice to have.

Reading the SwiftUI docs in 2022, it’s front and centre. They tutorial covers accessibility soon after “hello world”. Every module of the tutorial has a section on setting the right accessibility info, rather than a single, optional accessibility tutorial. It makes me happy that doing the right thing is the default.

I’m planning on making a small productivity app just for myself, but it’ll be 100% accessible simply because they’ve made it so easy.

3 comments

Integrating accessibility into the tutorial is fantastic, but I’d also attribute it to Apple emphasizing accessibility in their developer documentation for a long time. I remember one of the early Interface Builder tutorials explaining accessibility pretty early on.
I wouldn’t attribute this to progress. iOS and macOS have always heavily prioritized accessibility. For Google, you can see in this example and in the flutter example that accessibility is an after thought.
The last time I spoke to a blind person it was quite a different picture, she was more or less forced to exclusively use apple products because nobody else took accessibility seriously enough.