Set the accessibility attributes on UIBarButtonItem

Question

I am working on making my iPhone app accessible. I have several UIBarButtonItem objects in Interface Builder, and I cannot find any option to set the accessibility label or hint for these buttons.

How can I set these attributes?

Answer 1

Check out Apple's documentation on UIAccessibility.

Answer 2

Okay, so it seems there's no way to do it in Interface Builder, even though you can set accessibility attributes on other UI elements using IB. So I set a tag on my toolbar and then added this code to my viewWillAppear method:

UIToolbar *bottombar = (UIToolbar*)[self viewWithTag:kBottomToolbar];

UIView *view = (UIView*)[bottombar.items objectAtIndex:0];
[view setAccessibilityLabel:NSLocalizedString(@"Add Bookmark", @"")];
[view setAccessibilityHint:NSLocalizedString(@"Add Bookmark", @"")];

and so on for each button item...

Not the most elegant, but it works.

Answer 3

Trying to set accessibility labels manually didn't work for me with UIBarButtonItem images. However, if I set the title manually then the label would work. But it displays the title below the image.

I ended up creating an UIButton and using it as a custom view for the UIBarButtonItem. The only loss being the image masking that UIBarButtonItem performs. Added bonus: accessibility configurable in IB.

Answer 4

I got the code above to work with UIBarButtonItems with one extra line:

[view setIsAccessibilityElement:YES];