Category: Apple Developer News

As a teenager in Alabama, Christopher Gray was a straight-A student, community volunteer, and relentless dreamer. He was also the son of a single mother who’d lost her job to the recession. At times during his high school years, they were homeless.

With graduation looming, Gray came to see college as a necessity, but one priced like a luxury item. Lacking internet access at home, he searched for scholarships at the library, one hour at a time, in keeping with the posted screen limits. He often wrote 500-word application essays on his phone — not a smartphone but a chunky 2008 model with a tiny keyboard. He did this for seven months.

“I saw a problem and I tried to fix it,” he says from a Hollywood office populated by a handful of coworkers and one very large dog named Milk. “My grandma always told me, ‘You have to work. You have to ignore whatever is going on around you, put your head down, and focus.’”

When his first scholarship check arrived, he sensed his efforts paying off. By the time the last one came in, Gray had amassed $1.3 million.

He used the money to study finance and entrepreneurship at Drexel University (and to cover his living expenses for all four years). But the process nagged at him. How, he thought, could it be so disjointed? How many students had it discouraged from going or even applying to college?

“I realized there’s all this money looking for students,” he says, “and all these students looking for money.”

Enter Scholly. Founded at Drexel by Gray and fellow students Nick Pirollo and Bryson Alef, it launched in 2015 with the simple goal of matching students with available scholarships: Input your age, interests, and other demographic information and Scholly would find potential fits.

The idea, Gray says, was born from his desire to help others do what he did. “I got some scholarships because I was the only one who applied. A lot of times, students just don’t know they exist.”

More good news was to come. His story soon reached the producers of Shark Tank, and the rest is Scholly history: Gray’s 60-second pitch resulted in a near-instant deal with Lori Greiner and Daymond John—and some viral offscreen dramatics. (Greiner offered Gray his requested $40,000 without even asking questions. “I don’t care how we monetize,” she said, prompting a minor meltdown in which a number of sharks basically stormed out of the studio.)

I realized there’s all this money looking for students, and all these students looking for money.

Scholly Search is the classic example of a simple idea that exploded. Today, it has roughly 3 million users who have landed more than $110 million in scholarships.

Actor and activist Jesse Williams is a member of Scholly Search’s board; Chance the Rapper has appeared at its Chicago-based initiatives. The company has relocated from Philadelphia to California, into a sprawling corner office with mountain views.

“The amounts are compelling,” Gray says, “but what’s just as powerful are the stories of people who get, like, the last $3,000 they need to enroll. I always wear my Scholly sweatshirt when I travel, and people come up to me and say, ‘Oh wow, you’re Scholly!’ Not ‘Oh, you’re Chris’ but ‘You’re Scholly!’ And they’ll tell me their story. It’s really powerful to experience that, because, OK, I was a homeless kid.”

Still in his midtwenties, Gray has been named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list for social entrepreneurship and Oprah Winfrey’s “SuperSoul 100” (who are basically her favorite people). He’s spoken at the Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper summit and received the 2018 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award.

In recent years, Gray has set about evolving Scholly into a full-service education app. Scholly Math is an AI-powered standalone app that helps students solve tricky problems (while showing its work, of course). There’s also Scholly Editor, a web-based proofreader. “We originally created it to help with essays,” Gray says, “but a lot of kids are using it to get better grades and learn English, especially in underserved schools.” 

Mostly, he hopes to continue helping students reach dreams that circumstances might have once deemed impossible. 

“This good thing happened to me,” he says, “and now maybe I can help people who otherwise may not be able to help themselves.”

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Originally published on the App Store.

Before creating Shine, a self-care app that encourages you to “accept who you are today,” co-CEOs Marah Lidey and Naomi Hirabayashi set a few ground rules.

“We’re not going to assume you’re working,” says Lidey. “We’re not going to assume you have or don’t have kids or that you want kids. We’re not going to assume anything about your gender.”

Anything that felt “preachy, pricey, or presumptuous” was off the table too.

That foundation worked. More than 4 million users have signed up for Shine, with nearly one in three reviews describing the app as “life-changing,” according to Hirabayashi.

How do Lidey and Hirabayashi know their audience so well? They’re part of it — and have been for a long time.

The duo met in 2011 while executives at DoSomething.org, a nonprofit that helps young people transform their communities. The two started getting coffee, then lunch, then after-work drinks, creating what Lidey calls a “safe space to process the tough stuff.” 

Over time, they came to see the “tough stuff” in a new light. “What we were going through wasn’t weird — it was human,” says Lidey.

Shine grew out of their desire to make that safe space bigger, to help others with issues ranging from building a credit score to dealing with giving feedback to employees.

The app launched in 2018 as an “accessible but aspirational” text-based coaching program. Its tone is chatty and friendly, like “the friend that has a psych degree,” says Hirabayashi. (Shine’s actual psych cred comes from therapist and corporate coach Anna Rowley, who helped develop the curriculum.) Using a chat-based interface, the app helps you see how you see yourself. (Hirabayashi, for her part, is a “Caring Critic” prone to “extending compassion outward, but often struggling to bring that compassion home,” she says.)

Today the app is rich with features. The Daily Shine is a podcast that Hirabayashi describes as a “secular sermon.” Challenges are short, multiday audio courses on specific goals like “Be More Direct” and “Let Yourself Have More Fun.” “Nightcap” is a collection of sleep stories that double as winking retellings of 2000s rom-coms (“The Devil Wears Pajamas”). “They’re meant to be boring and also a little cheeky,” Lidey says.

Through all the growth, the pair’s goal has remained the same. The idea isn’t to solve every problem, but to adjust how people approach them, says Hirabayashi. “What’s beautiful is that the pressure is to be authentic, not perfect.”

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Originally published on the App Store.

Thirty years ago, Turo CEO Andre Haddad was in a parking garage beneath his family’s apartment building in Beirut, listening for the bombs.

It was 1989, the last of the 15-year Lebanese civil war, and the two dozen families living in Haddad’s eight-story building often spent their nights huddled in the relative safety of the underground garage. Although just big enough for six cars at most, it had become a shelter, strewn with mattresses and lamps and personal items brought down from the apartments above.

“You build up kind of a war wisdom over time: You don’t want to be on the top floors of your building,” Haddad says. “And a lot of the shooting would happen at night, so you’d try to sleep in the garage, hearing the shelling and building shaking.”

His family lived like this for more than a year, until the night the shells found their apartment.

Haddad is recounting his story in downtown San Francisco at the offices of his car-sharing app Turo, which that lets people rent out their (often very fancy) cars by the day. Want to drive a Lamborghini? Or take a BMW convertible from Vegas to the Bay Area? All doable. Today, Turo has more than 14 million members and 450,000 registered vehicles. Haddad’s road to get here crossed many borders, but it started that night in the garage.

After the bomb hit, things moved fast. Haddad’s family decided to to leave Lebanon and stay with relatives in Cyprus, but Haddad took a different path. Prior to the blast he’d been chatting with a cousin in Paris, one who’d asked him a question he’d never considered. “He said, ‘It’s your senior year of high school, what are your plans? What do you want to do?’” Haddad said. “I thought, wow, nobody’s asked me those questions. When you’re in those conditions, there’s not much of a vision for the future. It’s a mechanism of self-defense.”

The day after the shell landed on his balcony, Haddad called that cousin, and before long he had a ticket to Paris and a plan to get into business school. Seventeen years old and on his own, Haddad also found his way into the French music scene and became a DJ — he claims to have seen Daft Punk before the helmets — but there was a problem: His music had all been obliterated in the blast.

“I was looking for ways to rebuild my collection,” he says, “and I discovered eBay.”

The selection was incredible, but the more he bought, the more he wanted to sell — and the shipping charges were piling up fast. To address both problems —and using his speedily developing business instincts — he founded iBazar, which launched as a way to swap music and became one of Europe’s largest online marketplaces. iBazar grew large enough that it was eventually purchased by eBay for more than $100 million. Just like that, everything had changed.

Haddad spent the next decade in tech jobs, occupying positions with eBay and serving as CEO of Shopping.com. In 2011, ground down by the workload, he was planning on taking a sabbatical when a friend approached him about a car-sharing idea called Turo. “I got to really appreciate the creativity, the scrappiness, the hunger,” he says. Plus, he was well familiar with the notion of using the internet to connect real people. “Turo was built on trust, which made me feel very comfortable with it,” he says.

It’s an incredible highlight to see the power of humanity.

Andre Haddad

Today, Turo has more than 14 million members. “There are users who are barely 18, and some in their 80s,” he says. The app offers everything from standard sedans to exotic high-end imports, often for less than the price of a traditional rental.

In addition, after some initial hesitation, Haddad has become more vocal about immigration issues. “At first, I didn’t want any public involvement with this kind of noble cause to be misinterpreted as personal publicity — or even worse, corporate publicity,” he says. Plus, he adds, it hadn’t been easy to turn the page.

Today, he’s becoming more and more outspoken, both out loud and in writing. He’s spent years on the board of Immigration Equality, an organization designed to bring equality to LGBTQ+ immigrants. And he’s signed amicus briefs and open letters aimed at protecting immigrants. “It’s the right thing to do,” he says. “It helps the economic development of the United States. But the fact is, people are here because they chose to come here. It’s a very, very hard thing to do. If you’re willing to do that, it means there’s some exceptional traits of character.”

Originally published on the App Store.

When writer Chelsa Lauderdale was creating characters for “The Elementalists,” an interactive story in the game Choices, she wanted one in particular to have it all: great looks, enviable talent, a heart of gold.

In other words, everything you’d want in a potential love interest who also happens to be a wizard.

Lauderdale imbued him with real depth. As a student at a university for the magically gifted, Griffin Langley may be able to cast spells, but as a black man he struggles with expectations of his race and gender.

This is all part of her writing process with Choices. “One of the first things we asked ourselves was: What communities are we underserving?” Lauderdale says. “What can we do to make sure people see themselves in this?“

When she started the job, she was unsure how far to push the stories, which present players with different narrative options and let them choose how everything unfolds.

She had recently decided to cut her hair short and grow out what she calls her “baby Afro” after a conflicted relationship with straighteners and dyes. “I remember asking if it was OK to include a story line about how a character learned to love her natural hair,” she says.

There used to be this idea that black men shouldn’t show weakness. That can be a tremendous weight.

The team embraced the idea. “Since then I’ve tried to insert little pieces of my experience,” she says.

To Chelsa, Griffin brings many people’s real-world experiences to virtual life—and offers an alternative to how black men are usually portrayed in games. 

“There used to be this idea that black men should be hard, they shouldn’t show weakness. That can be a tremendous weight on people’s mental health and on their relationships.”

Griffin is the first character to greet you when you arrive at the magical university, and he warmly takes you under his wing. Over the course of your courtship, he gradually reveals his struggles, and together you tackle identity issues head-on.

“He’s torn between his tough appearance and sweet personality, his parents’ wants and his own,” she says. “I think this is a common feeling within the black community.”

Stories can perpetuate stereotypes or they can change narratives.

Chelsa is writing more Choices stories about identity — as well as young-adult fiction that explores female friendship and community.

“Stories can perpetuate stereotypes or they can change narratives,” she says. “That’s really up to the people who write them.”

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Originally published on the App Store.

Kaya Thomas has always been a voracious reader, yet growing up she rarely came across protagonists who looked like her. “High school was when I started to realize that none of the characters were ever black girls,” Thomas says.

This inspired her to code We Read Too, an app that helps you find children’s books by writers of color, featuring characters of color.

Thomas, a Dartmouth graduate, now lives in Oakland and works as an iOS engineer at Calm. She still remembers creating a new document on her computer and writing the list that would eventually become We Read Too. 

“The app looks much different today than it did in 2014,” she laughs. In its current version, you can browse by category (picture, chapter, middle grades, young adult) and search by title or author. There are currently over 900 books cataloged in the app.

High school was when I started to realize that none of the characters were ever black girls.

As it stands, We Read Too is a labor of love. Anyone can download it for free, and Thomas is dedicated to keeping it that way. “I wanted We Read Too to be accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they could afford to buy a $1 app,” she says. “I have no intention of ever charging anyone for access to the information.”

Although Thomas hasn’t earned any money from the app, it has paid off in other ways.

“We Read Too helped me build my network and connections, and gain the courage to move out to California and get into the tech industry.”

When asked how she’d like to see We Read Too expand, Thomas says it’s all about community: “First and foremost, I want to make sure that there are as many titles in the app as possible.” And she hopes to partner with libraries to integrate with their cataloging systems, since this is where many kids and teens get their books. 

Thomas also has a few words of advice for coders of all backgrounds. 

“Don’t let anyone discourage you. You have to realize that you are 100 percent capable of learning the skills,” she says. “There’s no one person who is supposed to be a coder. You are completely capable, and don’t let anyone say you’re not because of who you are.”

In 1995, Giesbert Nijhuis was touring through Europe with his ska-reggae band when his van tumbled off the road. The accident left Nijhuis paralyzed from the neck down. He was 26 years old.

“I couldn’t move anything except for my head, and only had an eighth of my normal breathing capacity. There was almost no hope of healing or repairing the spinal cord,” says Nijhuis, a professional graphic designer and photographer. “At first I was questioning if I wanted to continue life like this.”

David Niemeijer, a friend of Nijhuis’ since childhood, remembers that dark time well. “His new physical challenges drained the life right out of him.”

The accident affected every part of Nijhuis’ life, including his very livelihood. To edit images on his Mac, he needed to be able to enter key combinations, but the assistive onscreen keyboards available then didn’t allow for that. In his new situation—or his “second life,” as he likes to call it—he was facing serious accessibility issues.

So Niemeijer, who has a degree in agricultural and environmental sciences and was working at a university at the time, created his own assistive keyboard—what would become the Mac app Keystrokes. He soon scaled back his work at the university to focus on founding a software company, AssistiveWare, which released a number of pioneering accessibility tools for the desktop.

And then came the launch of iOS, which changed everything for Niemeijer by untethering assistive software from the computer. In 2009, just a year after the iOS Software Development Kit launched, AssistiveWare released its breakthrough product: Proloquo2Go.

Proloquo2Go gives a voice to those who have difficulty speaking (proloquo is Latin for “to speak out loud”). Paired with an iPhone or iPad, it also made this assistive technology more widely available. “It enables people to start learning to use it much earlier. It used to be that you’d get an expensive machine when you were 7 or 8 years old,” says Niemeijer.

“With an iPad or iPod touch, you can start around 2 or 3 years old, which makes a huge difference, because some kids then can go to regular schools and are not reliant on special education.”

Proloquo2Go presents a variety of simple drawings; tap them to create sentences that the app will read aloud. Instead of providing only a limited number of predetermined sentences and phrases, Proloquo2Go lets you combine words in infinite ways.

“It offers users total communication,” says Niemeijer. “It allows people to not just use utilitarian language, such as asking or answering questions, but also to share stories or emotional anecdotes. It allows them to tell a joke.”

AssistiveWare currently has a half dozen apps available across iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Pictello lets users create storybooks using text-to-speech and the photos on their iOS device. Keeble is a highly customizable keyboard app that supports users with motor challenges, low vision, and dyslexia. And News-2-You publishes a weekly newspaper, written with both text and symbols, for beginning readers.

Nijhuis is proud of what Niemeijer has managed to build. “I love having seen David’s works grow from the software he made just for me to the company it is today, serving so many people all over the world.”

The designer continues to influence AssistiveWare’s evolution: He created the company logo and the app icon for Proloquo2Go.

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Originally published on the App Store.

Apple Watch is built with accessibility in mind, empowering everyone to use their device in the way that suits them best — and your Apple Watch app can take advantage of all these features to create a seamless and inclusive experience.

When you’re designing your Apple Watch app, here are a few considerations to take into account to make it accessible to everyone.

Responsive, responsible reviews

One of the best ways to get a picture of the work you need to do is to explore Apple Watch’s accessibility and display options: These allow people to adjust or augment their interface and interactions with Apple Watch.

When designing your app, Dynamic Type and VoiceOver are two core settings worth exploring: Dynamic Type allows people to change the size of their text on Apple Watch, while VoiceOver helps people navigate without having to view the screen. You can enable or adjust either in the Settings app or on your iPhone’s Watch app at any time. 
We recommend testing your Watch app with these options enabled to make sure your app is fully accessible. You may also want to consider testing your interface with Bold Text, Reduce Transparency, and Reduce Motion.

For each test you run, ask yourself a few questions: How does your interface change? Are there aspects of your design that are no longer being well-represented? Take detailed notes and screenshots — these can help you go back and address potential issues in both your designs and your app’s Xcode project.

Scale up, scale down

Compared with other Apple products, the small size of an Apple Watch display means far less space for presenting text. As such, it can be tempting to consider specifying fixed smaller font sizes so that more text can be shown on screen at once.

Despite this, it’s important to use legible font sizes and support Dynamic Type. Displaying more text on screen, while helpful in principle, won’t help anyone if it’s too small to read. Instead, let text scale naturally, and use Apple Watch’s swipe gestures or rotate the Digital Crown to read longer text.

The quickest way to support Dynamic Type and text scaling is to use built-in text styles, which set type using Apple Watch’s system font: SF Compact. This font is specifically designed for optimal legibility at small sizes, offering nine built-in styles in a range of sizes and weights to help make text in your app as readable as possible.

As a general rule, all text in your app should scale appropriately when people adjust their text size. Fixed text sizes should be used only for information that is clearly legible at its default setting. For example, the Podcasts app uses built-in text styles to display the podcast title at a consistently large size, and enables its smaller text elements to scale.

If you plan to use a custom font within your app, you’ll need to take a few additional steps to ensure that it works with Dynamic Type, including adding the font to your project and configuring text styles.

Learn more about adding custom fonts >

Learn more about scaling fonts using Dynamic Type >

Support VoiceOver with accessibility labels

VoiceOver is a gesture-based screen reader that tells you exactly what’s happening on your Apple Watch, and helps you navigate it without the need to see the screen. You can add support for VoiceOver in your app with accessibility labels, which help people using the feature understand how your interface is constructed.

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Fun fact: If you want to quickly test VoiceOver in your app, you can use Siri. Just enable Siri and ask it to “Turn on VoiceOver.”

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When someone looks at your interface on Apple Watch, your app can rely on common visual paradigms like button shapes and lists to communicate information and actions. For VoiceOver, think about how you might translate that experience to someone hearing the interface of your app: Start by designating a clear reading order of your interface elements, and make sure that you label your interface elements with brief and clear descriptions.

There’s one more step to consider when implementing VoiceOver: Your audience may want to hear your interface in another language. VoiceOver supports more than 35 languages, and you can make sure your app is ready for use in all of them by localizing your text strings so that all accessibility labels and hints are read in the appropriate language.

Learn more about crafting a great VoiceOver experience in your app >

Learn more about adding accessibility labels to your app >

Learn more about localizing your text strings >

Watch and learn

Apple Watch is our most personal device, and it’s important to provide flexibility for people to experience their apps in the way that best suits them. For everything you create, it’s worth taking the time to test your app and make any adjustments. Whether you’re adding scalable text or incorporating a better VoiceOver experience, these changes have a big impact on people who need or want accessibility features on Apple Watch, and they’ll likely also help you craft better overall designs for everyone who enjoys your app.

Resources

Learn more about designing with accessibility in mind >

Watch “How to write great accessibility labels” >

Learn more about designing type for your apps >

Download SF Compact >

Download design templates for Apple Watch >

Learn more about supporting VoiceOver in your app >

How to use VoiceOver on Apple Watch >

VoiceOver is a core part of helping people navigate without needing to view their screen. Take this article, for instance: You may be reading this text visually; however, if you’re a developer who uses VoiceOver, you’ll hear this paragraph (and the rest of the article) spoken to you along with verbal descriptions of any important elements you might need to know about. And if you’ve opened this article in the Developer app, you’ll also hear about navigational elements in the app.

Whether you personally use VoiceOver or not, here’s how you can put yourself in the mindset of those who do to help design a standout experience.

Master accessibility elements in your app

When someone enables VoiceOver on iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, or tvOS, it begins describing all of the labeled elements on screen. To decide what to read, VoiceOver looks for accessibility elements — individual or grouped visual elements within a view — as well as whether someone can interact with these elements. As it describes an element, VoiceOver also highlights it on screen by displaying a black rectangle around the content.

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Tip: Explore VoiceOver on your own device

While Xcode provides you with several tools to test your app’s accessibility, you can learn a lot about VoiceOver and how various apps have implemented it by taking a test drive on your own iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or Apple TV. You can enable VoiceOver in the Settings app or System Preferences on your Mac, and if you want to have easy access to the feature, you can even enable a hardware-based Accessibility Shortcut.

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VoiceOver also adds a few specific multitouch gestures and taps to help people navigate their device. Swiping to the right anywhere on the screen will navigate to the next element in the view, while swiping to the left will navigate to the previous one. Each time VoiceOver lands on a new element, it speaks details like its accessibility label and value aloud, along with hints or traits if the element has any.

Alternatively, people may tap directly on a visual element to navigate to it. If it’s within the bounds of an accessibility element, VoiceOver will focus on it. Otherwise, VoiceOver will emit a “boink” sound.

By default, all standard UIKit controls are accessibility elements. To flag a custom control or view as an accessibility element, you can use isAccessibilityElement:

var isAccessibilityElement: Bool { get set }

Learn more about accessibility elements >

Group and declutter accessibility elements

When navigating by swiping, VoiceOver visits each element in order of its appearance on the screen. That said, this isn’t always the most efficient way for someone to absorb information: If your app has too many accessibility elements, it may take someone a very long time to understand it. Instead, look for opportunities to group your accessibility elements together and create a simplified hierarchy.

When you group your accessibility elements, VoiceOver will describe them together, which can speed up navigation through your app. For example, you might group a view that contains a title, text, and a time stamp label, as with Health’s Heart Rate title, heartbeat reading, and time of latest reading.

This also helps provide context for someone using VoiceOver that would otherwise be present in a visual interface: By grouping them and having them read together, this lets people know that the time and text are associated with the title, rather than three unrelated items.

Add custom actions

You can assign any accessibility element custom actions, which provides extra functionality. For example, if you use Mail without VoiceOver enabled, you can tap on a message inside the inbox to view it, but you can also swipe left or right on an individual message to access other features like deleting, flagging, or moving a message. Custom actions let people who use VoiceOver have access to those same features in a different manner: When VoiceOver focuses on the message element, it speaks the hint “Actions Available: Swipe up or down to select a custom action.” Once you arrive at the action you want, you can double-tap to perform it.

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Fun fact: When you implement leading or trailing table view swipe gestures in your app, you automatically get VoiceOver actions for these buttons in your project.

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Custom actions are very powerful when combined with grouped elements and can help simplify your navigable hierarchy. If you have a view as an accessibility element that has multiple buttons as subviews, for example, you aren’t always able to navigate to those buttons with VoiceOver. While it might be tempting to break up this up into smaller elements and allow buttons to become individually focusable, this may add clutter.

We strongly recommend using Custom Actions to expose these button actions, letting you keep the element’s organization while still providing full controls to someone using VoiceOver. When you carefully group your elements and add custom actions, it creates a better overall navigation experience and will make your app far more enjoyable for people who rely on VoiceOver.

To set a UIAccessibilityCustomAction on your accessibility elements, you can use accessibilityCustomActions:

var accessibilityCustomActions: [UIAccessibilityCustomAction]? { get set }

Learn more about custom actions >

Flag layout changes

Your app may change its layout visually to indicate the result of an action or event. In the Shortcuts app, for example, tapping the + button brings up components that will help someone build a shortcut. For people who use VoiceOver, you can use the “screen changed” or “layout changed” notifications to guide their focus to the new elements.

It’s best to use “layout changed” only when there’s a major change to your interface, as pulling focus too often can make people confused and lose context inside your app.

To post an accessibility notification, you can use post(notification:argument:) on UIAccessibility:

static func post(notification: UIAccessibility.Notification, argument: Any?)

Learn more about accessibility notifications >

Next steps

When you make these improvements to your app, you’re not only unlocking better VoiceOver support, you’re also laying the groundwork for our other assistive technologies like Switch Control and Full Keyboard Access. So go, explore, and make your app’s accessibility experience a great one — because technology is most powerful when it empowers everyone.

Resources

Learn more about VoiceOver gestures >

Watch “Writing Great Accessibility Labels” >

Watch “Making Apps More Accessible With Custom Actions” >

It took a while for Craig Hockenberry, principal at The Iconfactory, to realize his true calling. Although he began coding when he was 16, in 1976 (the same year the Apple I was released) his career took a detour into corporate management.

“We originally made Twitterrific because all the folks at the Iconfactory wanted an easier way to follow what our friends and colleagues were doing,” said Hockenberry. “xScope is another product in the same vein—we built it because we needed it. We’re our own best customers.”

To say Hockenberry has been ahead of the curve over the course of his storied career is an understatement. Twitterrific, released over a decade ago, was the very first Twitter client for Mac. Hockenberry even helped coin the term “tweet.”

And you know the signature blue bird everyone associates with the social network? Hockenberry created the first one: an icon he named Ollie. (Twitter later followed suit with its own variation.)

While the apps Hockenberry has worked on are designed for a diverse range of customers, the philosophy behind them has remained the same.

“When we create a new app, we’re always thinking, ‘What problem does this solve for the customer?’” he says. For Hockenberry, functionality and design are equally important. “Functionality overcomes the problem, and design makes it approachable.”

Ask anyone in the community for a shortlist of the best developers and Hockenberry’s name inevitably comes up — no doubt because he’s been such an active and generous member. Iconfactory.com gives away about 2 terabytes of icons and wallpapers each month. Hockenberry also blogs about development at furbo.org, where he’s always willing to share his know-how.

“It’s something I learned from my dad — you need to help others in your community,” he says. “When I find something cool or have a unique insight, I love to share it with other developers.”

Thankfully, he has no intention of slowing down.

“My grandfather always said, ‘You’re only as old as you act.’ If that’s the case, I’m still my younger self!”

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Originally published on the Mac App Store.