System-class Accessibility

This article illustrates system-class accessibility with our work enabling iPhones to be used nonvisually using the VoiceOver screen reader. We reimagined touchscreen input for nonvisual use, introducing new gestures suitable for control of a screen reader, and for output we added support for synthesized speech and refreshable braille displays (hardware devices that output tactile braille characters). We added new accessibility APIs that applications could adopt and made our user interface frameworks include them by default. Finally, we added an accessibility service to bridge between these new inputs and outputs and the applications. Because we implemented support for VoiceOver at the system level, future accessibility features that we have released since have directly leveraged this work to provide a consistent user experience.