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.

Low Vision support: For users with low vision, accessibility comes down to flexible screen contrast options, zoom, and the ability to control onscreen type size. These are addressed by features in the operating system, but can be undone if an app chooses not to follow iOS guidelines, especially support for dynamic type. Low vision support is my primary personal accessibility interest, so what I’ll share on that topic will get into the weeds.

Display: The Display screen in Settings lets you pick from three fonts, and either use text sizes based on your iOS settings, or within Ivory. The Ivory text slider does not work however. Perhaps that will be fixed going forward. For now, I’m relying on dynamic type and iOS per-app settings to get just the size I want. Unfortunately for me, noe of the three font options is ideal. You can also choose from two sizes of Action buttons and thumbnails. Great flexibility.

Theming: You can choose to follow the system’s light or dark mode, as you might expect, but there are also High Contrast and OLED modes. I can’t really see any difference with High Contrast, but perhaps that’s coming. And welcome! There are a bunch of Accent colors available, whose benefits I’m a little too color blind to see, but it’s a unique option, which I appreciate.

Browser support: I’ll wrap this up with a note about the Ivory browser. You can choose it, and even enter it in Reader mode, which I LOVE. Or you can choose you default browser. The Ivory browser even supports system dark mode, if that’s what you’re using, which I am. Brilliant!

@ShellyBrisbin It sounds like @ivory is paying much more attention too #accessibility. Is that fair? great that @tapbots is improving in this area. #accessibility isn’t really optional.