How to help VoiceOver read specific kinds of text using accessibilityTextualContext

Swift version: 5.2

Paul Hudson @twostraws October 20th 2019

Although VoiceOver does a great job of reading our interfaces by default, sometimes it can benefit from a little extra guidance in order to read content appropriately. accessibilityTextualContext is a property available on all UIKit controls that lets us mark content as being a specific type – output from the command line, some spreadsheet data, or even narrative speech.

For example, we could mark a label as containing source code like this:

yourLabel.accessibilityTextualContext = .sourceCode

Now that VoiceOver knows the label contains source code, it could choose to read out every character of punctuation rather than assume that “,” and “.” are just part of a sentence.