podfeetJun 20, 2024

I’m a low intermediate at VoiceOver and I use those skills to test apps for accessibility before recommending. I have a question - how do you, with VO, rearrange menu bar items? I can use control-option-m to get to the menu bar, but it’s the one on the left for the current app. I can’t reliably get to the menu bar items on the right. And when I do stumble into it, I can’t figure out how to select an icon to move.

Can someone give me a hint (or tell me exactly how to do it?)
#a11y #accessibility

Show threadRobin Kipp (old account)Jun 20, 2024
@podfeet As a blind VO user, I first of all want to seriously thank you for doing this! Doesn’t matter honestly if your experience using VO might be limited, as long as you test what you can and keep an open ear for user feedback on accessibility issues, that already goes a super long way and is significantly more than what some other devs / companies out there are doing, great job!!! Unfortunately it’s true that there isn’t a reliable way of rearranging status menu icons using VO. However, it is possible to navigate to all the icons which are in there by pressing the VO keys (either CTRL+Option or Caps Lock) + M twice, which will move VO focus to the first icon. You can then navigate through the various icons by pressing VO + Right Arrow / Left Arrow and activate the focused icon using VO + Space. Hope that helps!
Show threadpodfeet

@robin_kipp Thanks for the encouragement! I figure if I can tell you, “nothing for you here”, that’s valuable, or if something seems accessible I can suggest it’s worth a shot. Often I find just one or two things missing, tell the devs and they’re happy to hear about it. I’ve even had a dev say, “Really? My app is nearly accessible? How did I do that?” By using the APIs correctly!

thanks for the double keystroke - works a champ!

Jun 20, 2024 at 10:47pmWeb
Show threadpodfeetJun 20, 2024
@robin_kipp And here’s something fun. The app I was testing is Ice, a Bartender substitute. I was trying to figure out how to rearrange the menus but in fact with VoiceOver you can “see” ALL of the menu bar items even if they’re invisible to sited users because there’s too many! VoiceOver for the win!
Show threadRobin Kipp (old account)Jun 21, 2024
@podfeet Super glad to hear it worked, yay! Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions about VO, absolutely happy to help where I can :-).