VoiceOver Accessibility accessibilityHint not announced

Question

I observed that Voice Over does not announce accessibilityHint some times.

button.accessibilityHint = "Plays the song."

I have read it somewhere that the accessibilityHint will be ignored by iOS sometimes but i'm not able to find the reference in apple docs here.

Is this the default behaviour of iOS or i have done it wrong, Please help me to figure out the issue.

Answer 1

Accessibility hints can be ignored by the user. It is a configuration option available to VoiceOver users. This is why it is important not to include "critical" information in hints. "Plays the song" is a good example of a hint. I immediately know what the button does, but this information can likely be gleaned from other contextual information. Like if the label is a song and the app is a music player. A VoiceOver user shouldn't struggle deducing this, but users new to the application may find the hint useful.

Another good example for use of hint is as use to associate controls with other controls. For example to tie a label to a given heading or control grouping. Again, this information is such that it could be deduced from other contextual clues, and including it in the hint only serves as convenience, mostly for VoiceOver users unfamiliar with your application.

It is important to note, also, that hints can be hidden in other circumstances. For example, hints on segmented controls are never read out, unless applied to the individual segments. There are other examples where hints may end up hidden, particularly regarding groupings of controls, and handling those situations carefully.