VoiceOver screen reader support in our map SDK
By: Minh Nguyễn
Mapbox iOS SDK v3.7.0 will introduce full compatibility with the VoiceOver screen reader built into iOS. This ensures that those with blindness or visual impairment can interact with the map interface in a non-visual way — your application becomes useful to a whole new audience.
Users automatically benefit from this feature as soon as they enable VoiceOver, regardless of the style your application displays; you don’t write any additional code. As in previous releases of our iOS SDK, annotations remain accessible as well. Meanwhile, sighted users who leave VoiceOver disabled won’t notice any difference in behavior.
Let’s visit New Orleans to get a feel for how VoiceOver compatibility works. You’re standing in Jackson Square, and you want to know what’s around you. You open a Mapbox-powered map on your phone and it immediately locates you. As you swipe downward to zoom in closer to ground level, your phone reads aloud a summary of the available content: neighborhood names, prominent landmarks, and major roads.
Then you swipe left and right to have your phone read individual details back to you: businesses, museums, and parks are all accessible. You hear not only the names of these places but also short descriptions such as “café” and “village green”. Each road name is read aloud along with its general direction of travel.
VoiceOver compatibility is possible because of the vector data behind the visual displays of our maps. Unlike a rendered image or raster map tile, Mapbox Streets vector tiles and open data from OpenStreetMap are available in raw form for your own code to manipulate, even offline.
Combining VoiceOver support with our other building blocks gives you the flexibility to craft custom, non-visual interfaces. For example, Mapbox Core Navigation powers turn-by-turn walking directions with natural-sounding spoken instructions, and MapboxGeocoder.swift makes it easy to add location search, whether it uses a text field or SiriKit voice commands for input.
Follow our iOS SDK releases page to find out as soon as the next beta release comes out. If you’re attending State of the Map US in Boulder, Colorado, this week, try out VoiceOver-enabled maps in person at our booth.
Accessible maps for blindness or visual impairment on iOS was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.