Why it matters: Tapbots makes Tweetbot, a very popular Twitter app that routinely earns praise from the Apple pundit class, of which I am allegedly a member. But when I tried it some time ago, I found the app did not support VoiceOver, the iOS screen reader. And the developer never responded to requests that the app be made accessible.

When I saw that Ivory was potentially headed down the same path, including getting a lot of praise from people who say they value accessibility, I posted the above to ask Tapbots about their plans. The dev wrote back to say that theirs is a small team, and that accessibility was not on the current priority list. I maintain that if you make something good, and get credit in the community for doing that, people should know whether/how you approach accessibility.

On the list: I lined up to join the TestFlight when it opened up on Thursday. I’ve had no more direct communication with Tapbots. This is just something I decided to find out for myself. So, after long preamble, this thread is about what I’ve learned so far, regarding screen reader and low vision support.

VoiceOver support: Ivory does support VoiceOver. You can read, post and navigate the interface accessibly. It is entirely accessible, including some of the fancier features, like customizing tab bar buttons. This is really good! So naturally, I have a couple of suggestions.

First suggestion: implementing post actions on the rotor’s Actions menu would be awesome. With a post selected, switching to actions in the VO rotor should allow you to reply, boost, favorite, share, etc. To do these things now, you double-tap the post, then navigate to the buttons below – which are labeled. So, one or two extra gestures.
VO Suggestion 2: You can scroll your timeline by interacting with the scrollbar. I’d love a way to double-tap the top bar to fully refresh the page.