How voiceover should work in scenario with multiple scrollable controls

By Matt, 9 July, 2015

Forum
App Development and Programming

I have a question about how voiceover should work with regard to scrolling and focus:

The app in question has a search control underneath the navigationBar. The search control is made up of a search bar, and underneath that a horizontally scrollable list of suggested tags.

Underneath the search control, the main content is made up of a list of results which is vertically scrollable.

Typing in the search box or tapping a tag will immediately filter the list of results.

What would you expect to happen if you swiped to scroll (in both orientations) with either part of the search control, an item from the results or a button in the navigation bar selected?

I've looked at a few apps to see what they do, but haven't come across anything that seems conclusive as "the right way" to do this!

Thanks for any suggestions!

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Comments

By peter on Thursday, July 9, 2015 - 16:00

I would expect that as one flicks up/down the previous/next item in the list gains focus.

Note: flicking left/right with VoiceOver moves to the previous/next item on the screen, so you don't want to have a left/right flick perform the action of scrolling through the list. Use flick up/down instead.

--Pete

By Matt on Thursday, July 9, 2015 - 16:05

Thanks - that's useful. How about the 3-finger swipe. How does that fit in?

By sockhopsinger on Thursday, July 9, 2015 - 16:47

The three finger swipe is used in apps to scroll either by pages or by larger increments than just one. For example, if I do a three finger swipe in the alarm app when setting up the alarm in the hour or minute field, a three finger swipe will scroll the list by eight or nine hours instead of flicking up with one finger, which will move the scroler by an hour. Hope that makes sense. I don't know how the search results look on the App Store screens, but you might try playing with that with Voiceover.

By Matt on Thursday, July 9, 2015 - 17:02

Ok, so 3-finger swipe is similar to swiping a whole page of content at once.

I've tried to check out a whole load of apps, including the App Store, unfortunately none of them have quite the same issue as this app, in that while they have separate swipe-able containers, it makes sense for them to only react to swipes from the focussed control.

I guess the main question is would you expect 2 different controls on a page to react to a 3-finger swipe (1 horizontal, 1 vertical) when one of the controls in question has the focus.

Sorry for the inaccurate use of terminology here. I really appreciate the feedback!