Alastair’s Place

Software development, Cocoa, Objective-C, life. Stuff like that.

Implementing Accessibility in Cocoa (Coming Soon)

At NSConference, I promised a couple of people that I’d write up some of the work I’ve done on accessibility for our products, after they (and I) noted that it can be tricky to get the implementation right in a full custom view. iPartition’s pie chart view was a case in point; I remember spending literally hours trying to get the Voice Over cursor to do the right thing.

Anyway, I also decided that I should publish a few bits of code that we’ve been sitting on here, including a rather nifty Finder-esque icon view. Here’s a teaser screenshot from my test app:

iconview.jpg

(Yes, it really can cope with different icon sizes in the same view, if that’s what you want.)

While tidying the icon view code up yesterday, it occurred to me that it would make a good accessibility example; presently it doesn’t have accessibility support (in fact, right now it’s lacking a lot of keyboard support, which I’m going to add before publishing it). So what I’m going to do is finish adding basic keyboard support, since everyone knows how to do that already, and then I’m going to write an article showing exactly how to add the necessary code to make it accessible.