Learning Swift and app development with voiceover?

By KE8UPE, 14 August, 2020

Forum
App Development and Programming

Hi,
On my resolution list for 2020, I put, "Learn swift so I can create apps."
Does anyone know the best way to go about doing this with voiceover?
I've found a ton of Swift tutorials, but they all seem to be visual in nature, by making reference to the storyboard.

Thanks for any and all suggestions.

Options

Comments

By Survivor Wolf on Wednesday, September 2, 2020 - 17:51

My personal experience with trying to get into Swift development was similarly frustrating because of the storyboard centric tutorials and XCode requiring a great deal of effort to use with Voice Over, though I think the newer version may have reduced that pain point slightly.

First, I will say that I have found Flutter to be a much easier path to app development, as there is no storyboard at all to worry about and VSCode has a great deal of screen reader support built in. You can learn about that on Flutter.dev. However, if you want to stick to Swift and Apple platform apps only, here are a couple of suggestions.

1. Search for Swift UI tutorials, as this is Apple's newest way of developing apps and it seems more intuitive and powerful from what I've read compared to straight Swift.
2. You can find a handful of tutorials if you specifically search for ones that don't use the storyboard on Google
3. Spend some time exploring XCode and work on Voice Over drag and drop tricks. I was not able to solve all the issues with Storyboard, but it is possible to drag elements onto the canvas and if you learn enough from the other tutorials, it should theoretically be possible to modify those components once you manage to get to their correct code file

Best of luck!

By Survivor Wolf on Wednesday, September 2, 2020 - 17:51

From what I've seen, Apple's tutorials would be fine for learning about Swift UI itself, but still refer to the storyboard. Try these links for how to get rid of storyboard entirely and replace it with code. Beyond this I'm afraid I can't offer much guidance, as I opted to learn Flutter instead and don't have a Mac to work with any more.

https://sarunw.com/posts/how-to-create-new-xcode-project-without-storyboard/

https://medium.com/better-programming/creating-ios-apps-without-storyboards-42a63c50756f

https://softauthor.com/ios-ui-design-programmatically-xcode-9-swift-4/

The company I work for may be giving us Mac's for development work. I really dislike the Mac but use Vscode in Windows for all my programming. If I have to use a Mac how well does VsCode work with Voiceover?