I run an iPhone development company.  We’re currently making our UK train times app fully compatible with VoiceOver. We’re being helped by users of the ViPhone Google Group, which is a forum for discussing the iPhone 3GS and its support for visually-impaired users.

I saw a comment from a member of the group the other day, shortly after Section 3.3.1 went mainstream:

Could this mean more accessible apps for VO users?

Note the meaning behind the comment.  Not “how dare they”, or “shame on you”, but “hurrah – this will mean that apps are more likely to be accessible via VoiceOver.”

Making better quality iPhone apps isn’t just about how they look – it’s about how they sound.  And that’s another reason to develop your apps in Xcode.

We’re just putting the finishing touches to VoiceOver accessibility support for our National Rail Enquiries iPhone app. When adapting the app for VoiceOver, we found that Apple’s developer documentation for accessibility was pretty good, but there were still several questions we couldn’t answer. After some help from Apple, and some experimentation and research, we’ve managed to answer most of our queries. I thought it might be useful to share what we discovered, in case other developers have run into the same problems. Here are our questions and findings.

Continue reading →